
Class X)^^7^ 

Book - 37 

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GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 

This Edition is limited to 500 copies, printed from type^ 

and the type distributed 



Glimpses of Europe 



A SERIES OF LETTERS WRITTEN FROM 
ABROAD TO THE "STANDARD- 
UNION" OF BROOKLYN, 
NEW YORK 



BY 

JESSE JOHNSON 

FORMERLY JUDGE OF THE NEW YORK SUPREME COURT 



^^ 


s 


^^ 



THE GRAFTON PRESS 

NEW YORK MCMVI 



Library of CONGRESS 1 


Two Copies 

D£C8i 


Received 

»906 


Cepyri^ht Entry 

CLASS ^ XXc, No. 

COPY B. 



J) 



.T 



4-, 



1 



Copyright, 1906, by 
Jesse Johnson 



BEDIC A TED 

to my dear wife, 
who accompanied me in this journey 



CONTENTS 

I From New York to England ... 1 

II The Ancient City of Chester ... 9 

III The World's Metropohs .... 15 

IV Westminster Abbey 20 

V The Heart of Midlothian .... 29 

VI The Land of " The Lady of the Lake " 37 

VII London Again, and Windsor ... 42 

VIII In the French Capital 48 

IX Some Residences of French Royalty . 55 

X Railroad Traveling in the Swiss Alps . 63 

XI Across the Snow-clad Alps .... 68 

XII Mont Blanc as Seen from Lake Geneva 72 

XIII Napoleon's Tomb in Paris .... 85 

XIV French Peasants on Market Days . . 93 
XV From Geneva to the Riviera ... 97 

XVI Cheerfulness of the French People . .104 

XVII How Soldiers are Made in the French 

Army 108 

XVIII Monte Carlo, the Cancer Spot of Europe 112 

XIX Venice and Other Historic Cities of 

Northern Italy 116 

XX The Homes of the Caesars .... 124 



GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 



GLIMPSES OF EUROPE 

I 
From New York to Engiland 

Old Chester, Eng., July 14, 190 — . 
Mindful, of the promise you secured from me just be- 
fore I left Brooklyn, I will now try and give you a 
little sketch of my journeyings since then. 

Saturday, July 4, was the day on which the good 
ship Umhria, on which our passage was secured, was 
to siail from the Port of New York. 

As we were leaving the St. George we met an old 
friend who, wishing us bon voyage with a smile that 
might have been a foreglow of the millennium, assured 
us that, with the progress of the ages, seasickness, with 
other ills, had been abolished. Having our apprehen- 
sions as to mal-de-mer thus happily allayed, we pro- 
ceeded to the street, where we met many friends who 
were there to give us good-by and good wishes. And so, 
entering our carriage with the pleasurable warmth and 
glow which always comes from the greetings of friends, 
we left our hotel to proceed to the Umhria. There we 
met my son, with his charming wife, evermore a daugh- 
ter in affection, who had come to give us a last good-by 
and Godspeed for the journey. 

At 12 o'clock the great ship moved out from the 



br^W' 







From New York to England 



dock and our voyage to Europe had begun. Neither 
Mrs. Johnson nor I had ever been abroad before, and as 
we moved down the broad and beautiful harbor, under the 
glow of the July sun, our hearts were filled with the 
happiest anticipations and imaginings of the land 
across the water which we expected to see. We recalled 
the lines of Tennyson : 

" All experience is an arch where thro' 
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades 
Forever and forever." 
" It may be we shall touch the happy isles." 

He would be cold, indeed, whose heart would not be 
warmed by the thought that at last he was actually 
sailing across the great ocean to visit the old and his- 
toric lands which had been to him history and poetry 
for fifty years. 

The good ship carried out to sea about three hundred 
and forty first cabin passengers, and these, with the 
passengers of the second cabin, officers, seamen, waiters, 
and attendants, made about one thousand people, who 
were putting out into that waste of waters, trusting 
to the seaworthiness of the Umbria and the skill and 
care of Captain Dutton and his accomplished officers 
and brave and hardy sailors. 

I had spent many years on the south shore of Long 
Island, and had thought that, as we sailed by, I should 
see some of the old familiar places, and note how they 
looked from my new point of view. We were called to 
lunch at 12 o'clock, and as we came again on deck, I 
looked for the familiar places on the Long Island shore. 
But we were already so far out that the shore was 



From New York to England 3 

barely visible — a mere line of dark blue, fringing the 
horizon — and, as the good ship moved on at the rate of 
twenty miles an hour, even that view was soon lost, and 
we knew that we were on the Atlantic, not again to see 
a sign of land until we had traversed three thousand 
billowy miles. 

Except for a little chill, Sunday morning was beauti- 
ful, the sea calm, and the ship moving almost as steadily 
as though moving up the Hudson. The service of the 
English Church (Episcopal) was read by one of the 
officers of the ship, and all day long the beat and throb 
of the great engines continued, and the ship with the 
freight of one thousand lives pushed out Into the At- 
lantic at the rate of twenty miles an hour. In the 
afternoon we were told that perhaps we might expect 
fogs, as we were off the Great Banks. Our captain had 
selected a course which took us well south of the Banks. 
This course, we were told, was about four hundred 
miles longer than the more northerly one, and that It 
had been selected because the captain had Information 
that there were icebergs north of us, drifting along the 
fishing banks. 

As all day long we felt and saw the rush of the great 
ship, and, knowing we were not yet midway on the 
ocean, we realized how vast and broad is the great waste 
of water that till 1492 had kept what is now America 
from the view and knowledge of the Old World. 

Wednesday we learned that the Etruria, which had 
sailed from Liverpool about the same time we left New 
York, had passed us, and that the ships had exchanged 
greetings and salutations by the Marconi telegraph 
system. The Etrwria did not come within our view, and 



4 From New York to England 

was said to have passed us forty miles to the north. 
The passing the Umbria's sister ship, which had com- 
menced her voyage from the other side at about the 
same time as our own voyage, made more noticeable the 
fact that with three days of fast saihng we had only 
reached midocean. 

But how wonderful and marvelous it seemed; those 
messages coming to us from a ship far down beyond 
the horizon line. It set us imagining what would 
be the future of this wonderful wireless telegraphy, 
and the lines of the old song came to us: 

" We onlj know she sailed away, and the ship was never heard 
of more." 

Many years ago, as I remember, one of the finest ships 
in the United States Navy, which had been beaten and 
seasoned by many voyages, sailed out of port, with 
banners flying and guns booming, and passed out be- 
yond the horizon line, and from that day to this no 
message or tidings of that good ship have ever come 
to land. How strange it will seem when some day some 
such ship, battling with adverse storms and seas, and 
about to sink in the unsounded ocean, from out of the 
darkness and the unknown, by this new telegraphy, 
sends some last message, revealing at once its fortune 
and its fate. 

Thursday the sea was still calm, though it continued 
cool. The throb of the engines had continued day and 
night, and more and more we began to realize how vast 
and broad is the great Atlantic. 

That evening there was a fine concert given in the 
dining saloon. The chairman of the entertainment was 

s 



From New York to England 5 

the Right Honorable the Earl of Dunmore. The ac- 
companist at the piano was Mrs. Leith MacGregor, of 
Scotland, who charmed all on board by her spirited and 
sympathetic performance. Among the other perform- 
ers was Mr. George B. Penny, who gave us a selection 
from Chopin on the piano, and Mr. Edward O'Mahony, 
of the Carl Rosa Opera Company, and Mr. Tom Daniel, 
of the Dolly Varden Opera Company, both of whom 
are fine artists, and with their deep and sympathetic 
voices broke the stillness of the mid-Atlantic on that 
starlight night. 

After the musical entertainment Dr. Burland, the 
ship's physician, gave us a few incidents of life on 
board an Atlantic liner. On the programme his remarks 
were put down as " A Few Chestnuts." He commenced 
by telling that the appellation " chestnuts," given to 
old and well-worn stories, was entirely of American 
origin, and that in England they called such stories 
" church bells," because they were " tolled " so often. 
He told us of an Irish emigrant woman, 103 years of 
age, who was going to America with her " little " 
daughter, 75 years of age. 

At the close of the performance the Earl made an 
appeal for contributions toward the seamen's orphan 
institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, and we were 
told that since the establishment of the orphanage at 
Liverpool, 85,000 seamen on English vessels had been 
drowned. The proceeds of the concert were about £32 
($160), and the following evening a similar concert 
was held in the second cabin. P. A. Simpkin presided 
and appealed for charity, the proceeds of that concert 
being about £17 ($85). 



6 From New York to England 

The sea was still calm the next day, broken only by 
the swash and swell made by the great ship as she 
drove her way through the water, and by the waves, 
like ripples, which hardly affected the motion of the 
ship. 

We were told that on the morrow we might expect 
to see land at Queenstown, and with this again came 
to us the pleasurable excitement of the unknown — 
hidden friends down below the horizon line,, toward 
which we were so rapidly hastening. 

Saturday morning we found ourselves in sight of 
land just south of the Irish coast, and making our way 
in toward the harbor of Queenstown. 

I happened to stand on the forward deck as the ship 
was slowly making its way, stopping occasionally for 
soundings or other information. Near me were a party 
of gentlemen, one of whom made some remark indicat- 
ing impatience at the slow progress of the ship. One 
of the party remarked, " It is better to be sure than 
sorry." The remark seemed to me so appropriate and 
just that, half unconscious of the act, I repeated, 
" Better to be sure than sorry." As I did so the 
gentleman who had made the remark turned to me and 
said, " Are you Mr. Johnson, of Brooklyn .^ " I con- 
fessed that I was. He said, " Perhaps you know my 
father? " I then learned that the gentleman whose re- 
mark I had thus taken up was F. E. Finnigan, the son 
of my old friend, the Hon. Michael J. Finnigan, of 
Brooklyn. 

He told me he was going abroad on a business mission 
for a structural iron company, and left his wife with 
a little son but six weeks old; that his wife urged him 



From New York to England 7 

to go, because it was his duty to do so, and he added 
" she was a brave httle woman," a remark which seemed 
to be quite as appropriate and true as that which I had 
first heard him make. 

It is one of the beautiful incidents of travel thus to 
meet the kindred and acquaintance of old friends, and 
when we do so we know each other at once. I was 
rejoiced to meet Mr. Finnigan and to send, through 
him, words of kind remembrance for his respected 
father. 

Slowly we proceeded up these land-locked waters 
toward Queenstown harbor. We there had our first 
glimpse of the Irish coast — rocky headlands rising 
abruptly from the waters. 

Just before we reached Queenstown there was a break 
in the headlands, and we saw green fields on the Irish 
shore, looking as " fair as the gardens of the Lord." 

About noon a tender ran out from Queenstown and 
took about sixty of our passengers, who desired to make 
a landing there, and brought us papers, letters, and 
telegrams from many. Leaving the tender, the ship 
pushed on northward toward Liverpool. 

We had been told that our voyage north from 
Queenstown would be in sight of the Irish coast, and we 
had hoped to get a further glimpse of the Emerald 
Isle, but as we proceeded north toward Liverpool the 
fog shut out the shore from our view, and we were 
constrained to go below without any further view of 
Ireland. 

About 9 o'clock, on some rocks near a lighthouse, we 
saw the masts and smokestack of a wrecked steamer. 
We were told that this was the steamer Manchester * 



8 From New York to England 

Commerce, a ship as large as the Umbria, which had 
run on the rocks in a fog about six weeks before, and 
then lay there, battered by the waves and fast break- 
ing up. 

When we awoke Sunday the throb of the machinery 
had ceased, and the ship was lying at rest in the great 
harbor of Liverpool. As we came into Queenstown 
Tom Daniel said to me: "When Englishmen come to 
New York they are met at quarantine by a reporter, 
whose first question is, 'How do you like America?' 
and so I ask myself, ' How do you like England? ' " 

I will answer such question now by telling you how 
it seemed to me as I looked through the porthole that 
Sunday morning. It ! seemed to be a commercial city, 
for the first thing I saw was a huge board sign, on 
which was printed in hues visible across the bay: 



> 



I said to myself, how would a puppy laugh that hap- 
pened to see that sign; but then I remembered that a 
notice had been posted in the ship, that no one would 
be allowed to take a dog ashore unless accompanied by 
a license from the English authorities, and I thought 
this was another case of a puppy's blasted hope; an- 
other item to the long account against our English 
cousins. 

At 8 o'clock our ship came to the dock and we went 
ashore. 

At 10 o'clock our trunks were through the Custom 
House and placed in charge of the agents for the rail- 



The Ancient City of Chester 9 

way, and marked for this old City of Chester, to which 
we came on Sunday morning. 

Our voyage, altogether, was delightful. The state- 
ment of our old friend, that seasickness had been 
abolished, seemed true; and, now, stopping at this 
frontier city of old England, we dream of the wonders 
and excitements that lie beyond, and again wonder 
whether " we shall touch the happy Isles, or greet the 
great Achilles, whom we know." 

I would only add that I would like to say to all my 
friends, " Come to Europe ; and if you are able to do 
so, sail by the good ship Umhria/' 

II 

The Ancient City of Chester 

Oxford, England, July 20, 190 — . 
When I first wrote to you I was at the old city of 
Chester. Since then I have come to Oxford, the city 
of ancient universities and churches, about seventy 
miles from London. To-day we expect to go to Lon- 
don, and from there to Scotland. 

At Chester we found what appears to be an old 
Roman wall. Perhaps it may not be entirely the same 
material of which the wall consisted two thousand years 
ago, but there can be httle doubt that its location and 
general appearance is as it was during the time of the 
Romans. We learn that the Roman legionaries here 
built a wall, the circuit of which is about two miles, 
with a gate called the East Gate, passing through 
and under the wall, and another gate down by the 
water, called the Water Gate, which at that time 



10 The Ancient City of Chester 

was doubtless reached by the triremes and hghter 
draught boats of that era. Through this enclosed 
place were sunken streets through which marched the 
Roman legionaries, and the whole place was a border 
camp, or fortress, convenient to a hospitable port, by 
means of which supphes and reinforcements might be 
obtained, and located in the forests of ancient Britain, 
surrounded by wild and hostile people. The sunken 
ways then built for the convenience or safety of the 
garrison are now streets of the city, and the houses and 
shops appear to have been built on the original higher 
level, and to have been carried out so as to project over 
the sunken way, being supported by columns rising 
from the level of the present street. These overhang- 
ing buildings present a very curious appearance. They 
are called Rows. In one of them is a building called 
" God's Providence House." On it is an ancient in- 
scription, " God's Providence is Mine Inheritance," and 
it is understood that this building stood there in the 
seventeenth century, in the time of the plague. The 
tradition is that no one in this old house was then 
stricken, and that that was the only house in the place 
that did not yield a victim to the terrible plague, and 
that the inscription was put there by its pious owner. 

But it is not alone in the relics of Roman conquest 
or of Roman domination that we see proofs of the 
antiquity that has given Chester the sobriquet of " The 
Ancient City." 

Here is an old cathedral whose steps are worn by the 
feet of generations of pious worshipers. Its walls are 
adorned with pictures in mosaic, giving evidence, in 
their fading colors, and in their antique characters, of 



The Ancient City of Chester 11 

the many years they have been on those walls. The 
cathedral, venerable in style of interior decoration, and 
in its exterior Gothic points and pinnacles, is said once 
to have been a monastery, and it still has the old clois- 
ters, fairly preserved, imbedded in massive walls. 
These cloisters are grouped around a small piece of 
green turf which, doubtless, was once a garden for 
the monks who here sought a retreat and refuge from 
the fierce encounters of those warlike and tempestuous 
times ; and here, we may beheve, they found peace and 
happiness in worship. 

The old Church of St. John the Baptist, now partly 
in ruins, is another testimony to the antiquity of Ches- 
ter. We approached this church through a yard in 
which the numerous graves were marked by stones, some 
broken or leaning, and nearly all covered with moss or 
mold, and so much had the "tooth of time " eaten 
into them that their lettering was hardly legible. As 
we approached the church we saw a tower of brown 
stone about as high as the walls of the church. A guide 
or attendant, whose loquacity seemed to be stimulated 
by the hope of a " tip," soon joined us. He informed 
us that the upper part of the tower crumbled and fell 
about twenty years ago, but not so as to injure the 
main structure of the church. The roof is supported 
by two rows of heavy columns, and the columns lean 
to one side and have been tied together by iron bands 
to give them support. The loquacious guide informed 
us that the arches between these columns were of the 
type known as " Old Norman," and I suppose they were 
constructed at least 1000 years ago. Behind the chan- 
cel were ruined and broken walls, extending twenty or 



12 The Ancient City of Chester 

thirty feet, the remains of chambers in which, at one 
time, Thomas De Quincey hved, so were told. 

The guide next pointed out to us a neat brick house 
on a pleasant slope a mile or two away, the house being 
almost hidden by the overhanging and intervening 
trees. In it, the guide informed us, Thomas Hughes 
passed his last days. Thomas Hughes's principal dis- 
tinction in America is that he wrote the story of " Tom 
Brown " — " Tom Brown at Rugby " and " Tom Brown 
at Oxford." The guide informed us that Mr. Hughes 
returned from America an old man, broken in fortune, 
and was then appointed to a judgeship in that locality. 

I remembered hearing, some years ago, that Thomas 
Hughes had purchased a large plot of land in Tennes- 
see for the purpose of establishing a colony to be popu- 
lated and conducted according to his ideals. And as 
we looked at the modest cottage where Thomas Hughes 
had lived and died, my heart warmed toward the man 
who had left us such a fine story of schoolboy life, and 
who gave us his ideals in the story of Tom Brown — 
honest, truthful, generous, and brave. Perhaps it was 
because Thomas Hughes had high ideals, and loved to 
find and reveal the best in his fellow-men, that he at- 
tempted in Tennessee what proved to be a failure. But, 
after all, is it not much better to be an optimist, and to 
have high ideals, and, in striving to hve up to them, to 
fail, than it is always to keep to the safe middle ways 
of life? 

Taking a drive through one of the many fine macada- 
mized roads that lead from the city into the surround- 
ing country, our carriage stopped in the center of a 
high stone bridge, from which we looked out on a river 



The Ancient City of Chester 13 

which, from that point of view, did not seem much 
wider than the Erie Canal, but it was fringed with 
bushes and bordered by smiling fields which were dot- 
ted with stately trees and luxuriant with verdure, and 
which, with the river, made a most attractive picture. 
Our driver told us, " That is the River Dee." " The 
River Dee ! " The name seemed to revive some old 
memory, faint and far, like the music of a dream ; but, 
near or far, it still pursued me, and seemed somehow 
to remind of some old ballad melody. And what was 
the music, the echo of which was awakened or half -re- 
called, as our stolid and prosaic driver, pointing with 
his whip over the side of the bridge, told us that the 
stream below was " The River Dee " ? 

The next day we went to Grosvenor Museum, where 
we saw a picture and a bust of Charles Kingsley, who, 
we were told, while he was a Canon of the Enghsh 
Church, officiated at the Cathedral, and lived in Chester. 
As I saw the face, and heard the name of that great 
divine, novelist, and poet, to me came spontaneously the 
words of Kingsley's lyric poem, " The Sands of Dee " : 

" O Mary, go and call the cattle home, 
And call the cattle home, 

Across the sands of Dee. 



They rowed her in across the rolling foam, 
The cruel, hungry foam. 

To her grave beside the sea: 
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home, 

Across the sands of Dee! 

And England is full of such reminiscences and re- 
minders. The same day we drove to Hawarden Castle, 



14 The Ancient City of Chester 

where Gladstone spent his last days, and where he died 
but a few years ago. Near by is the old church where 
he worshiped, and his son still officiates as rector, and 
the beautiful hbrary building, erected as a memorial 
of the great Commoner. 

In the other direction from Chester is Eaton Hall, 
the ducal palace of the Duke of Westminster. The 
grandfather of the present duke was the first of that 
line who held the ducal title and honor ; it came to him, 
as we are told, through Mr. Gladstone when he was 
Prime Minister. Gladstone, himself, so I recollect, more 
than once refused a title and a coronet ; and how much 
greater is the name of Gladstone than any paper title 
royalty could have conferred upon him ! 

Chester lies near Liverpool, and I would advise all 
Americans who come to England by way of Liverpool 
to visit Chester. To me the impressive thing in Eng- 
land is the age of the country, shown in its macadam- 
ized roads, its beautiful hedges, and large and mag- 
nificent trees, and when I look out on these fields, 
which have been tilled for a thousand years, and see 
the herds of sheep and cattle, the luxuriant fields of 
waving wheat, and its verdant hills, I think this is a 
fair and beautiful land, and as we Americans rejoice 
in the glories and beauties of our own country, we can 
understand how Englishmen love Old England, and 
why England was known in song and story as " Merrie 
England." 

Leaving the " Ancient City of Chester," we came to 
Leamington, whence we drove to Warwick Castle, 
understood to be the home and seat of the great king- 
maker. From there we went to Kenilworth, which is 



The World's Metropolis 15 

now a ruin, and in its ruins seems to be touched by the 
sad and pathetic story of Amy Robsart, and of the 
revels and rejoicings of Queen EHzabeth. 

Now we are in Oxford, in which are twenty-two his- 
toric old colleges. 

Ill 

The World's Metropolis 

London. 
A WEEK ago to-day we left Oxford and came to 
London. The distance was about seventy miles ; we 
made the journey in about one hour. Here I should 
like to say something of the English railways, and Eng- 
lish traveling. 

Their cars, it seems to me, are distinctly inferior to 
our American railway cars. They are called carriages, 
and they are, in general, more like a carriage than they 
are like the cars or coaches used for passenger traffic 
on our American railways. 

The cars are divided into compartments extending 
from side to side of the car, and, say, about six feet long. 
There are two seats in each compartment, so arranged 
that the passengers sit facing each other. When the 
cars are in motion, on most of the cars, there are no 
means whatever for communication between the con- 
ductor and the passengers. These cars impress me as 
though they were constructed from the old-fashioned 
stage coach. Take an old-fashioned stage coach and 
take away the seat for the driver and have the seat on 
the top of the coach removed, and put on low wheels 
and flanges on the wheels, and the result would be some- 



16 The World's Metropolis 

thing very similar to English railway carriages. But 
if their cars are distinctly inferior to ours, it seems to 
^ me their railroads are distinctly superior. As I ob- 
served, these railroads are carried under and over the 
intersecting highways or railroads. Sharp curves are 
avoided, and much of the way on our journey from 
Oxford the railway was laid considerably below the 
surrounding country and in an open cut. 

On such a road the speed is about one mile per min- 
ute, and seems to be easy of attainment. We have a 
few roads in America which have recently been brought 
to as high a state of perfection. I should say the 
Great Western Railway is about in the same class as 
the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and 
Washington. Coming by such a train and at such a 
rate of speed without crossing any intersecting road, 
without making any grade crossing we arrived at the 
Paddington station, which is well within the compact 
portion of London. 

When about half an hour out our attention was 
called to a beautiful river, not far from the railroad, 
along which were many boat houses, groves, and other 
places which seemed to be fitted up for pleasure. I was 
told that this was the Thames, the great river always 
associated with the name of London. 

I had supposed that the Thames was principally an 
arm of the sea, and so principally made up by tide 
water. This beautiful river which we saw ghding down 
from these pleasant valleys seemed even there to be a 
stream of considerable importance. It seemed to me 
about as large as the Hudson River above Troy. 

England is comparatively a flat country, and water 



The World's Metropolis 17 

from rainfalls does not go into the streams in such 
deluges as it does in our more mountainous country, 
consequently the rise and fall of their streams is less 
frequent, and the amount of each rise much less than 
in our country, and the banks of the English streams, 
instead of presenting the bare, denuded appearance 
which we so often see even on our most beautiful rivers, 
very generally are covered with turf, or other vegeta- 
tion, so that the banks are not readily distinguishable 
from the green and gently sloping fields that lie back 
from the water. I noticed this particularly on the 
Thames, which seemed to flow full between beautiful 
banks, with the grass coming right down to the water's 
edge on both sides. 

And so we are at last in London, historical and gi- 
gantic London, almost weird and strange with its 
throngs of memories, history, and associations. To one 
stopping here, there is no need to study history or guide 
books to inform oneself that this is a great city. As we 
sit upon the banks of a great river there comes to us 
a sense of the power of the great interior fountains that 
are sending their waters to supply and replenish the 
volume that is rolling by, and as I gaze on these 
thoroughfares, crowded with thronging life, I can but 
feel that I am in the center of one of earth's greatest 
congregations of sentient and throbbing life. The 
guide book tells me that London has a population of 
six and one-half millions ; and not only is it the largest 
city on the globe, but it is the largest city that has ever 
been put on this earth. Its population is more than 
twice that of Paris, a little less than twice that of 
Greater New York; if my recollection serves me right, 



18 The World's IMetropolis 

about the same as that of the great Empire State. 
When Brooklyn was compelled to give up its individual 
existence, and was merged into Greater New York, we 
believed that, in itself, it was a city of very considerable 
importance. Yet, as I recollect, its population, accord- 
ing to the then last preceding census, was not quite a 
million people. Imagine six such cities and business 
merged together, and the result would be a city of about 
the size of London. 

I am not trying to describe all that I see in my little 
journeyings; the guide book and photographs and the 
Stoddard lectures, with their moving pictures, will do 
that work much better than can be done by any letter. 
I am only trying to tell you how what I see and hear 
from day to day impresses one who has spent his whole 
life on American soil; and, to me, the vastness and 
gigantic proportion of this great city continually im- 
presses and makes my wonder grow. 

I called at the American Embassy. I had known Mr. 
Choate in New York, and also in our Constitutional 
Convention, of which he was president. I saw in West- 
minster Abbey, on a marble bust, the words " Rare Ben 
Jonson." I should say of our American Ambassador, 
" Rare Joe Choate," a simple American gentleman, with 
all the culture of the schools and rich with the learn- 
ing which comes in a generation spent at the bar in 
busy, alert New York. Mr. Choate received me kindly, 
and naturally made me feel that though wandering 
far from home I was still an American' citizen, and still 
in some degree under the protection of the American 
flag. As I left I thanked Mr. Choate for his courtesy 
and kindness, and could but say to him that his courtesy 



The World's Metropolis 19 

to me was as if I had seen the American flag dipped to 
me as I was passing by. 

Through the kindness of Mr. Choate I was permitted 
to be present at a session of the House of Commons, and 
so to listen to an exciting debate in relation to sugar 
bounties and countervailing duties. That is one of the 
measures brought forward by the government, and is 
generally credited to Mr. Chamberlain, the Colonial 
Secretary. The debate clearly showed that, in the opin- 
ion of the House, the United Kingdom is on the eve of 
a general election that is to be conducted on economic 
issues, and that the question of protection, or, as it is 
called here, preferential duties, is to be a leading issue 
in the campaign, and that the leading argument in 
favor of such protection or preference will be drawn 
from the history of our great republic, which, adhering 
unshrinkingly to a protection policy, has solved suc- 
cessfully the most difficult problems, and attained a 
degree of prosperity which is the wonder and admira- 
tion of Old World statesmen. 

And always America, her career, history, and destiny, 
are in the forefront of every problem which comes to 
the European statesman for attention. 

Of course, I went to see Westminster Abbey and St. 
Paul's Cathedral, neither of which I shall attempt to 
describe, but I feel satisfied if I am able to put into 
words a little of the impression which those mighty 
monuments made upon my mind. But when I approach 
topics such as those, I would wish that I had nothing 
else to consider, and so for another letter I shall re- 
serve St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. 



20 Westminster Abbey 



IV 

Westminster Abbey 

Edinburgh, Aug. 13, 190 — . 
We came to this place from London, and find it a 
beautiful and historic city, very rich in memories of 
its great men. The place interests me so much that I 
should like to say something about it to you and your 
readers, but I have promised to give you my impressions 
of the great Abbey and great Cathedral of London, and 
I feel that I should do so before undertaking the nearer 
and more inviting task of writing of Edinburgh, 
" Royal Edinburgh," as Mrs. Oliphant correctly names 
it in her book. 

Westminster Abbey is an ancient and stately build- 
ing, but it is the use to which it has been put, and the 
long continuance of that use, that makes its name sig- 
nificant and makes it known as one of the most dignified 
and impressive structures on the face of our planet. 
From the days of the early English kings until now 
Westminster Abbey has been used as the burial place 
and mausoleum of great or distinguished men, and it 
is the long continuance of that use, and the good judg- 
ment and fairness with which the selection of those to 
whom such place of burial and sepulcher should be 
allotted, that, I think, give it that dignity and im- 
pressiveness which makes it clearly one of the wonders 
of the world. 

Perhaps because the space in the Abbey is so nearly 
occupied, the Cathedral, in some respects, is becoming 
a similar mausoleum; and, perhaps, in that respect it 



Westminster Abbey 21 

might be deemed an annex to the Abbey. Very im- 
pressive, indeed, is that old Cathedral, with its towering 
dome and spires, ever climbing heavenwards. Someone 
has said that architecture is a poem in stone ; following 
the simile, St. Paul's Cathedral, symmetrical and ar- 
tistic in windows, pinnacles, and dome, all seeming to 
aspire and climb upwards, is like a prayer and aspira- 
tion to divinity cut in stone ; and standing beneath the 
great dome, and passing from there down the great 
nave and transept, with drooping flags and speaking 
marble on either side, each a memorial of some great 
man, or of some great deed of daring or of sacrifice, the 
Cathedral seemed to be more and more impressive, per- 
haps more like the imagined Hall of Valhalla than any 
other earthly structure. 

But, after all, perhaps the most impressive part of 
the Cathedral is the crypt. To reach the crypt we 
descended about twenty feet through a carefully locked 
door, which is opened for us, and find ourselves on 
another level, and on another marble floor about twenty 
feet lower; from this floor rise the great walls, but- 
tresses, and columns which sustain the enormous weight 
of the soaring structure above. Near the foot of the 
stairs is the grave of Sir Christopher Wren, the great 
architect of the Cathedral. Near the grave is a slab 
with an appropriate inscription in Latin, ending in 
the familiar phrase which we may construe, " If monu- 
ment you seek, look around." Passing down the long 
nave, with monument, grave, or tablet on either side, 
about in the center of the nave and, I should judge, 
nearly under the center of the great dome, we see a 
structure of marble and metal, rising nearly to the floor 



22 Westminster Abbey- 

above ; on the top is a metal casket, which is said to have 
been designed and made by order of Cardinal Wolsey: 
and inside, in a plain wooden coffin, constructed from 
the mast of a captured ship, are the remains of one of 
the greatest men of history, viz., Lord Nelson. Before 
we entered the crypt we had read the grand lines of 
Tennyson on Wellington and Nelson. 

These lines I must reproduce here; they are as 
follows : 

" Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest, 
With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest. 
With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest? 
Mighty Seaman, this is he 
Was great by land as thou by sea. 
Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man, 
The greatest sailor since the world began. 
Now, to the roll of muffled drums, 
To thee the greatest soldier comes; 
For this is he 
Was great by land as thou by sea." 

Passing further down the nave we come to another 
structure, like the other, rising nearly to the floor above. 
There, in a casket of marble, beautifully cut and 
tightly closed, we are told are the remains of Welling- 
ton — the Iron Duke — and, going still a little further 
down the nave, we come to a great metal carriage, 
which, we are told, is the gigantic triumphal car on 
which the body of the great duke, enclosed in this 
marble casket, was brought to the place where it now 
rests. This carriage, we are told, was made from can- 
non captured by Wellington, and was drawn by a great 
number of white horses attached to a pole or shaft, 
which has now been removed from the car; and, stand- 



Westminster Abbey 23 

ing there in that dim hght, between those two great 
tombs, we could almost feel, with Tennyson, that per- 
haps the waking ear of the great Admiral became for 
a moment sensitive as the gigantic car bearing the dust 
of Wellington entered that place of shadows and of 
graves. 

Surely, if aught could touch the " dull cold ear of 
death," a nation's wailing and the nation's homage over 
the remains of their great soldier should have reached 
the spirit of the great Admiral, whose dust is so 
grandly enshrined beneath the soaring spires of the 
great Cathedral. 

The Abbey had its first use as a mausoleum from the 
fact that it was the burial place for kings ; but the 
English are a very practical and sensible people, and 
by-and-by it seemed that it should be made the burial 
place of those greater than monarchs, whose brows had 
worn no diadem; and so, by-and-by, there were placed 
in the greater Abbey the dust, statues, and memorial 
tablets of Milton, Newton, and other great but untitled 
dead, whose names give dignity and impressiveness even 
to Westminster Abbey. 

Nor is the right of burial there dependent on rank 
or on position, except the rank or position given by 
great thoughts or by great deeds. It seems to me that 
there is no young Englishman who resolves to do an 
act of great daring or sacrifice for his country but may 
ask, and fairly expect, that his remains shall find a 
resting place in those dim shadows, with the flag of 
his country drooping over him. One of the finest me- 
morials in the Abbey, gigantic in size and done in speak- 
ing marble, is that of three captains, all young men, all 



24 Westminster Abbey 

of whom were mortally wounded in the same great bat- 
tle. And the monuments to soldiers and sailors, not 
high in rank, who have died for England on the slip- 
pery deck or in the battle front in India at Waterloo 
are very frequent. 

In one of the niches of the Cathedral is a monument 
to those of the cavalry division who died during the 
Crimean War, which carries the names of generals, 
colonels, privates, and drummer boj'^s ; and over the 
memorial hangs the drooping flag, as though in con- 
tinuous salute to those loyal dead. 

Nor are the monuments confined to martial heroes. 
In the Abbey or in the Cathedral — for to me they 
seem one in purpose and effect — are monuments or 
inscriptions to Dr. Samuel Johnson, to Newton, and to 
Darwin, to Lyell and Locke, to Richard Cobden, the 
great champion of the policy of free trade ; to Howard, 
the engineer, and to Cooper, the famous surgeon. 
Among the most attractive portions of the Abbey is 
what is called the Poets' Corner. 

Here are monuments of Tennyson, Browning, Dry- 
den, Landor, and William Wordsworth, and to our 
own Longfellow. Nor are the favorite heroes and 
heroines of the dramatic stage without memorial and 
remembrance here. We find in the Abbey monuments 
to Garrick, Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons ; while in the 
Cathedral, near the grave of Sir Christopher Wren, 
is a stone inscribed with the name of Arthur Sullivan, 
the genial musical composer, known in America princi- 
pally as the author of the music of " Pinafore " and 
" The Mikado." I was told by the guide that Sullivan 
was buried in the Cathedral at the request of Queen 



Westminster Abbey 25 

Victoria. Sir John Franklin, the great Arctic explorer, 
and General Gordon are both remembered and honored 
among the stately monuments of the Abbey. To me 
there is a strange parallelism between Sir John Frank- 
lin, the Arctic explorer, and General Gordon. The lives 
of each were prominently identified with works for the 
uplifting of their fellow-men, and yet how different the 
story of their long labors, and how alike their tragic 
endings ; the one sailed into the snow and frost and dim 
twilight of the Arctic seas, and there died in that in- 
tolerable cold, no one knows exactly how or when; the 
other took his last mission to the torrid Soudan and 
there died at the hands of the fanatical Dervishes, how 
or when we only know from the story and confession 
of his murderers. 

Each of those great men has there his marble bust 
and an epitaph written by the great poet, whose marble 
bust is not far away. The laureate's epitaph on Frank- 
lin is as follows: 

" Not here : the white North has thy bones ; and thou. 
Heroic sailor soul. 
Art passing on thy happier voyage now 
Toward no earthly pole." 

His epitaph on General Gordon reads : 

" Warrior of God, man's friend, not here below. 
But somewhere buried in the waste Soudan, 
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know 

This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man." 

' This is, indeed, the great burial monument of the 
English-speaking people of the world. Here, side by 
side, in speaking marble, stand Disraeli and Gladstone, 



26 Westminster Abbey 

their long rivalries ended ; and here in marble are Grat- 
tan, the Irish orator, and Fox, Pitt, Peel, and the other 
great ones, whose policies he championed or resisted in 
the name of Ireland. 

But what most, and most happily, impressed me was 
the thought that America and Americans have a part 
in the honor and monuments of the great Abbey. 

There are few finer monuments and few monuments 
more conspicuous or better placed than that of General 
Wolfe, who fell in the moment of the victory which 
secured Quebec and a great continent to the dominion 
and ascendency , of the English-speaking race, and 
gave a death stroke to the dominion of France in North 
America. Our War of the Revolution came so soon 
after the French and Indian War that the magnitude 
and importance of the former war has been lost sight 
of. We call the latter war the War for Independence ; 
but very justly might it be said that the former war 
was a war for existence. It was a war fought under 
most adverse conditions. Battles were fought on snow- 
shoes, in wliich the wounded and weak were frozen, and 
in which the healthy and unwounded barely escaped. 
There were marches made through the untrodden snow 
in unexplored forests. Parkman was our first historian 
who understood and placed in their proper perspective 
the events of that long war; and, as I read of the ter- 
rible sufferings and daring of those winter campaigns, 
Napoleon's advance to and retreat from Moscow seem 
in comparison a very little thing. 

It was through William Pitt the elder (afterward 
Lord Chatham), and through the splendid military 
genious and daring of General Wolfe, that the Enghsh 



Westminster Abbey 27 

colonies triumphed, and that North America was given 
to the Enghsh-speaking race rather than the French, 
and equally fine and equally well placed with the monu- 
ment to Wolfe is the monument to the Earl of Chatham. 

I know nothing more dramatic in the history of great 
men than the last entry of the Earl of Chatham into 
the House of Lords. He was no longer a member of 
the House of Commons, or of the Ministry, and he had 
retained his place in the House of Lords only because 
the tenure there is for life. Our War of the Revolution 
had begun, and many battles had been fought and 
much blood had been shed. 

In April, 1778, the Earl, then an old man, sick and 
worn with his long service, made his last appearance 
in public life. That appearance was in the House of 
Lords, where he had come to plead for the American 
colonies, and to enter his protest against the policy of 
the King and of the Government toward these colonies. 
What he was then doing was but the carrying out of 
a line of conduct to which he had long been committed. 
Very frequently he had spoken in relation to the policy 
of the King and of the Government toward the Ameri- 
can colonies, and had uniformly, strongly, and forcibly 
opposed and protested against the policy of the Gov- 
ernment, and had espoused and vindicated the course 
taken by the colonies. 

When he made his last entry into the House of Lords 
he had arisen from a sick bed, and he entered the House 
swathed in flannel, leaning on his crutches and sup- 
ported, and almost carried, to his place by members of 
his family circle. In such a condition he made his 
speech, which is historic in America, and which, I think. 



28 Westminster Abbey- 

is found in almost every book containing extracts for 
declamation at schools and academies. As he spoke his 
strength seemed to return to him, and his voice came 
clear and strong as in the old days. Soon after, aris- 
ing to speak for the second time, he fell back apparently 
lifeless, and in a fit ; and in this unconscious condition 
he was carried out of the House, never again to enter 
it. He never recovered his strength, but died about a 
month later. Chatham was a great man, a friend and 
defender of the American colonies, and, as it seems to 
me, we should reckon him as one of our martyrs fallen 
in; the Thermopylae of American liberty. 

And over the great west and principal entrance of the 
Abbey, in speaking marble, stands the monument to 
Chatham. It represents him as I would imagine him 
standing as he made that last and most famous speech 
against the policy of the Government in relation to the 
American colonies ; and right by him is the monument 
erected by Massachusetts to the brave General Howe, 
who was killed in the French and Indian War on the 
march to Ticonderoga. 

And so, as it seems to me, Westminster Abbey, in a 
large and just sense, is, in part, for us, citizens of the 
great Republic beyond the sea: and if within those 
portals, among kings and princes, those that held the 
scepter " and wore the crown, there could be placed a 
plain marble statue of Abraham Lincoln, it would seem 
to me, to be an act on a par with the many that have 
made that Abbey a mausoleum, not only for the great 
dead of England, but for the great dead of the English- 
speaking people. 



The Heart of Midlothian 2^ 



The Heart of Midlothian 

Edinburgh, 17th August, 190 — . 
We came to Edinburgh direct from London, making 
the journey in eight hours by the Great Northern Rail- 
way. We had intended to stop at Cambridge, which, 
next to Oxford, is one of the greatest unversity towns 
in England, and at York and Durham, where are old 
cathedrals which we had promised ourselves we would 
see. But we had seen much of abbey and cathedral in 
London, and in the roar of great London we had seemed 
to hear the voice of the north hills calling us to the 
land of Scott and of Bums ; and so swift and direct 
past college, abbey, and cathedral we came, without 
stopping, to old and historic Edinburgh. Here we 
learned that this city is situated in the country of 
Midlothian, that the house where Gladstone's father 
lived is still to be seen in one of its old streets ; and 
that when Gladstone made his last great contest for a 
seat in the House of Commons — ^the contest that made 
him for the third time Prime Minister of England — 
the contest was for the right to represent this Mid- 
lothian district. 

In a small square, in an old part of the city, set in 
a dark blue pavement, are some tiles of brighter color 
representing a heart, and that heart in that somber 
square they call here the " Heart of Midlothian," and 
it is in this old historic city of Edinburgh that the plot 
and action of Scott's " Heart of Midlothian " was laid ; 
and a little red-tiled cottage, in an obscure street, was 
pointed out to us as Jeanie Deans's cottage. 



30 The Heart of Midlothian 

Straying out from our hotel, on the morning after 
our arrival, about half a mile to our right we saw Edin- 
burgh Castle. It is the most conspicuous object in or 
around Edinburgh. From its highest peak we see the 
British flag always floating. The castle is usually oc- 
cupied by a regiment of British troops, and custom as- 
signs this honor to a Highland regiment. This Edin- 
burgh Castle is more rock than castle. Stevenson, the 
novelist, whose birthplace was here, calls it a " Bass 
Rock on dry land." It is about three hundred feet high 
and rises precipitous and almost perpendicular on three 
sides. One of its three sides is nearly as steep and clear- 
cut as our Palisades, and around it, wherever the cliffy 
breaks a little, high, perpendicular stone walls have been 
constructed, and within these walls are towers and heavy 
stone buildings. Edinburgh Castle, like most of the 
castles of this country, was originally a fortress — a 
fortress built before the days of gunpowder, and con- 
sequently with steep walls and high towers made to 
resist the onrush of bowmen or spearmen, rather than 
the assault of artillery or rifles. We had visited War- 
wick Castle before going to London ; that was the castle 
of the old " King-maker," and presented sharply the 
appearance of a fortress built for the days preceding 
gunpowder. As we were leaving Warwick we passed 
a party of young ladies, apparently school girls, and 
one of them, I suppose a teacher, was pointing out to 
her companions the openings in the walls of the castle 
above us, apparently formed for the convenience of de- 
fending bowmen, and pointed out the place where great 
stones were rolled down so as to rebound and crush 
assailants. At Kenilworth, a short distance from War- 



The Heart of Midlothian 31 

wick, the same general characteristics appeared again; 
through one of its crumbling towers we saw the iron 
lining, or ribs, of an old well, going down through the 
central tower into the xock beneath, so that in times 
of siege its defenders should have the necessary supply 
of water. And in one of the towers of Kenilworth 
Castle we saw a deep pit, encased on all sides by rock 
or stone, and that, we were told by the voluble guide, was 
the old dungeon ; and he named to us princes and kings 
who had been held prisoners within the dark and forbid- 
ding walls of that old dungeon. 

Edinburgh Castle, like Warwick and Kenilworth, is a 
remainder and reminder of those troublous and cruel 
times. In castles such as these the kings and rulers 
usually resided, apparently to secure their own personal 
safety. If we could imagine a condition of society which 
would make it desirable, there should be a fortress on 
Fort Greene hill where our Mayor and other city officials 
should retire at night to secure themselves against cap- 
ture or slaughter, we should probably imagine the state 
of society indicated by these old castles. These pic- 
turesque ruins are interesting and historic ; but as places 
of residence they are cold, damp, and dark, and, in 
my opinion, repellent rather than attractive. 

And such is Edinburgh Castle, a few stone buildings 
perched on a steep and rocky hill ; and so, regarding the 
castle as a fortress, it is easy to see why that high rock 
was selected as the place of this border fortress. 

We visited the castle the first morning after our 
arrival here, and driving up to it, we came upon a little 
parade ground large enough for the evolutions of a sin- 
gle regiment, and which had been constructed for that 



32 The Heart of Midlotliian 

purpose. As we came to this parade ground we saw a 
re^'inieut luarchiiio- and counterniarclilno-, l)ein<2^ drilled 
by its colonel. We were very fortunate in this, for the 
regiment, the famous Black Watch, was in full High- 
land costume; in other words, driHing in full-dress uni- 
form, with kilts and tartans, their brawny and bare legs 
taking the Highland quickstep over the parade ground. 
We were told that this regiment had just come from 
South Africa, that it had been on foreign service for 
twenty years, and that when it marched back there were 
but two men in its ranks who were with it when it went 
away. We thought of the refrain of Kipling : 

" We have salted it down with our bones, 
(Poor devils) — have salted it down with our bones; 
We have bought her tiie same, with the sword and the flame. 
And salted it down with our bones. 
Salted it down with our bones." 

Passing this parade ground, we came inside the walls 
and among the stone buildings that crown the hill. 
There we saw the half-moon battery, from which a gun 
is fired every day at 1 o'clock. A little further up, on 
the highest part of the rock, we were taken inside a little 
stone building, bare and cold and entirely without orna- 
ment ; this, we were told, was St. Margaret's Chapel, and 
while it may not be the ver^^ stones and material which 
stood in the days of Queen Margaret, it is doubtless a 
reproduction of the little chapel where Queen INIargaret 
worshiped nearly a thousand years ago. I know no 
prettier story in history or fiction than the idyl of the 
coming of Margaret to this castle. Here lived Mal- 
colm Canmore, King of Scotland, mentioned as Malcolm 



The Heart of Midlotliian 88 

in the play of " Macbeth." He was of Gaelic descent, 
doubtless witli the coiirao-o and stern, but ru/:]f^ed, virtues 
of Roderick l)hu. Into the Firth of Forth — four miles 
away — one moniing came three vessels. Going down 
to the harbor, the Kin<]^ there met a Saxon princess, 
most of whose life had been spent in the luxury of the 
court of her grandfather, in southern Europe. She had 
sailed from London attended by her ladies and royal 
retinue, intending to go to the court of her grand- 
father, but had been driven northwards by a great 
storm, until they hnd been forced to come into the Firth 
of Forthi for refuge and shelter. We have no story of 
the wooing, but we know that in a few days, in a little 
chapel, between this rocky castle and the bay where 
these strange vessels lay (still called St. Margaret's 
Bay), the King and the Saxon princess were married, 
and that she came to this rocky fortress to dwell, bring- 
ing into Scotland much of the softer niid more cultured 
life of England and southern Euro})e, and that ]\vr 
gentle nature so prevailed that, in these rough, troub- 
lous times, she was beloved and revered by all, and that 
she left many children, who, with their descendants, suc- 
ceeded to the Scottish throne, holding it for many 
hundred years. From this little cliapel we passed 
through a large room filled with ancient weapons, spears, 
and swords, and armor for men and for horses, and on 
men and horses of wood or wax was placed or ;ir ranged 
this heavy armor. On the horses were the knights 
armed with heavy swords, and around tlu\se horsemen 
were foot soldiers, also cased in steel, carrying pikes 
which consisted of strong poles about 15 or 20 feet long, 
at the end of which were long, sharp knives, or daggers. 



34 The Heart of Midlothian 

From this array it was easy to imagine, and we seemed to 
see, the front of " grim visaged war " in those rough 
and rugged .days. From there, still inside the fortress, 
we went to a room called Queen Mary's Room. This is 
the room where Mary Queen of Scots is said to have 
lived, and in a little communicating room, certainly not 
larger than a small hall bedroom in a Brooklyn house, 
we were told the Queen bore James VI. of Scotland, who 
became James I. of England, and under whom the crowns 
of England and Scotland were united. 

The next day we went to Holyrood Palace. There, 
also. Is a room called Queen Mary's room, and in con- 
nection with it a small room, called Mary's bedroom. 
Leading to those rooms were dark stone stairways, wind- 
ing upward within the circular walls of the palace. In 
one of these rooms, we were told, Queen Mary was sitting 
when a band of conspirators, headed by her husband, 
entered the rooms, and, in her presence, demanded the 
life of Rizzio, one of her attendants, a musician, who 
had come from the French court. 

The next day, In the National Picture Gallery, we 
saw a picture of this old room, with Rizzio lying just 
outside, dead from fifty dagger wounds, and the con- 
spirators, In full armor, with swords and daggers drawn, 
standing over him, while In the next room her dastard 
husband, the coward Darnley — ^who was soon to die from 
a similar conspiracy — appears, as though striving by 
caresses and excuses to comfort the grief-stricken and 
affrighted queen. And so In two days we saw the 
historic reminders of two queens of Scotland, each of 
whose lives runs through and through the web of Scot- 
tish history and Scottish romance, both beautiful, both 



The Heart of Midlothian 35 

reared in the court-life of southern Europe, each the 
mother of long lines of kings — the one, altogether fortu- 
nate, with a grace and sympathy that caused her to 
plead with her sterner husband to release captive pris- 
oners of war, and through all her life 

*' To make mild 
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 
Subdue them to the useful and the good," 

and who ended her days in that old chapel, surrounded 
by her ladies, and enriched by the love of a warm- 
hearted people, whose descendants still love and venerate 
her as Saint Margaret. The other queen, altogether 
unfortunate, was to leave a memory and history running 
through scenes of blood and tragedy, and was at last 
suddenly, and in the gloom and chill of the early morn- 
ing, to meet her death by the headsman and the ax. 
Such reminders and records, though they may be in- 
teresting, are certainly not pleasing. These scenes of 
the castle and the palace seemed to us much too somber ; 
and so the next day we strayed through a little park 
running along the side of Princes Street — the principal 
street of Edinburgh — where we found a marble statue 
of Sir Walter Scott, the great " Wizard of the North." 
This statue represents Sir Walter sitting, attended 
by one of his favorite hounds, and is placed underneath 
the central portion of a great monument of brown stone, 
rising with gothic spires and pinnacles SOO feet above, 
and, after the castle, the most conspicuous object in 
Edinburgh. In the same park are bronze statues to Dr. 
Livingstone, the great African explorer ; to Allan Ram- 
say, the early Scottish poet, who preceded Burns; to 



36 The Heart of Midlothian 

Professor Wilson, known in literature as " Christopher 
North," and to Adam Black, the publisher, all of whom 
were citizens of Edinburgh, and a little further down is 
a monument to Robert Burns, and a statue to Abraham 
Lincoln, the great poet and the great commoner of the 
common people. 

This statue to Lincoln is of bronze, and represents 
him standing on a base of polished granite, from the 
foot of which a freed slave looks up gratefully toward 
the great emancipator. This statue of Lincoln is said 
to be the first statue to him ever erected in Europe. 
This monument was erected by Scotsmen and Scotch- 
Americans as a memorial of the Scotch- Americans who 
fell in the Civil War, and is spoken of in the guide 
book as 

" Another clasp of loving hands, 
Another link across the sea." 

The statue and monument to Scott are directly in 
front of our hotel, and we find ourselves under the spell 
of the wizard of the north, and we read again the " Lady 
of the Lake." We are told that less than a day's 
journey to the north is the land of the " Lady of the 
Lake " — Ellen's Lake, the country of Roderick Dhu and 
the wild and rugged Trossachs — the hills and lakes for- 
ever populous with the characters and imagery of that 
most beautiful poem. And so we haste away to the hills 
and the lakes forever touched by the rich imagery of 
Scott, and sounding wdth the wild strain of his " Harp 
of the North." 

While staying here we met Judge Vann, of our Court 
of Appeals, who, with his charming wife, is utilizing his 



Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 37 

summer vacation by taking a journey to the land of 
Scott. It chanced that we were stopping at the same 
hotel, and I found it very pleasant, indeed, to meet him 
after traveling so long and so far among strangers. 
They left a week ago, hastening back so that the Judge 
might have a week in Albany before the beginning of 
the fall session of the Court of Appeals. 

VI 

The Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 

The Trossachs, Scotland, Aug. 22, 190 — . 
This is regarded as a central point in the " Lady of the 
Lake " country. We came by rail to Callendar ; from c» 
there we took stage to this place. The stage ride is 
about ten miles, and we found ourselves in a party of 
five, riding on top of a stage running from Callendar 
to the Trossachs. 

Shortly after leaving Callendar it commenced to rain, 
and in a short time it became a perfect downpour, driv- ^■ 
ing in our faces and starting little brooks which came 
flashing down the steep hillsides along the road ; but as 
no one travels in Scotland without a waterproof gar- 
ment, we were prepared with the necessary wraps, and, 
cheered by the opening and nearer views of the great ^ 
mountains, we faced the pelting rain in cheerful and 
almost joyous mood. Sitting at my right was an old 
gentleman, who, I afterward learned, was in his ninetieth 
year, a hale, hearty, healthy, fine specimen of the Eng- 
lish yeomanry. As we rounded one of the lesser 
mountains the old gentleman said to the driver, " Where 
is Coilantogle ford.? " The driver said, pointing to a '^ 



38 Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 

gate and a few sticks of timber, " That is it over there " ; 
then, in the pelting rain, the old gentleman answered : 

" ' For this is Coilantogle ford. 

And thou must keep thee with thj sword.' " 

From there our ride carried us along the shores of 
Lake Vennachar and Lake Achray, beautiful lakes about 
half a mile wide, lighting up the wild, rugged valley 
through which we were passing ; and in that pelting rain 
the lakes looked about as dry as the hills or anything 
around us. So we progressed onwards and we did not 
hear again from our yeoman friend until we came to a 
heavy stone bridge carrying the road over a little 
stream, which, swollen to a mountain flood, poured 
swiftly down to the lakes. The driver said, as we came 
to this bridge : " That is the Brigg of Turk " ; when 
our yeoman friend repeated: 

" ' And when the Brigg of Turk was won. 
The headmost horseman rode alone.' " 

The next day, when the sun was shining and we were 
able to see better than in the rain of the day before, we 
saw that the stage which we rode that ten miles on was 
named " Roderick Dhu," and another stage running on 
the same line was named " James Fitz-James." 

A little farther on to the west is Loch Katrine, an- 
other very beautiful lake — perhaps the most beautiful 
of this chain of lakes stretching through these Highland 
mountains almost from sea to sea. Near the head of 
that lake is a little island heavily wooded, not larger than 
three of four city lots, and that is called " Ellen's Isle." 



Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 39 

In the hotel I found on sale an illustrated edition of 
the " Lady of the Lake," indicating where the deer ran 
and the hunt followed in the wild and stirring chase, 
which is the opening incident in the story of the " Lady 
of the Lake," and in that book is a picture of " The 
Combat," showing Roderick Dhu, when, 

"Like adder darting from his coil, 
Like wolf that dashes through the toil, 
Like mountain cat who guards her young. 
Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 
Received, but recked not of a wound, 
And locked his arms his foeman round." 

Following the road half a mile toward Ellen's Isle, 
we passed a wild mountain glen, which the map coming 
with our new edition of the " Lady of the Lake " tells us 
is the point where the " Gallant Gray " fell exhausted, to 
rise no more, and, as we passed the little glen, peering 
through the shadows among the rocks and the thick- 
growing trees, we could almost imagine we saw Fitz- 
James as he says : 

" I little thought when first thy rein 
I slacked upon the Banks of Seine, 
That Highland eagle e'er should feed 
On thy fleet limbs, my matchless steed ! 
Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day, 
That cost thy life, my gallant gray ! " 

And so to us, and I think to all pilgrims here, these 
great mountains, glens, lakes, and streams are made 
populous with the characters and incidents summoned 
to life and action by the genius of the Wizard of the 
North, as we read this sweetest of his poems. 



4» 



40 Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 

As I followed the roads and paths about the hotel 
I could but thank myself that, before leaving Edin- 
burgh, we had taken a day to visit Abbotsf ord, the home 
where Scott lived and died, and that we went from there 
to Dryburgh Abbey to view his grave. Under a little 
remnant of the roof of the Abbey is the grave of Sir 
Walter Scott. Between it and the road are heavy trees 
entirely shutting it out from view. The Abbey is said 
to have a history running back seven hundred years, 
and near by is a very old yew tree, which, tradition says, 
was planted when the Abbey was constructed, and so is 
seven hundred years old. 

The remains of the old Abbey and the grave are on 
a beautiful grassy hill, sloping gently down to the 
" chiming Tweed," which lightens and illumines all the 
surrounding landscape. The Abbey itself is almost in 
ruins, but a few of the heavy walls containing the clois- 
ters or built over the heavy entrances are still remain- 
ing. Some of the gables, running up to a point where 
the roof was supported, and pierced for gothic windows, 
are also still there, and over all the beautiful English 
ivy twines and clambers, presenting towers and pinna- 
cles of ivy green. Taken altogether, this beautiful hill- 
side, with the river partly visible through the interlacing 
trees, these old ruins, covered and caressed by the crowd- 
ing and trailing ivy, make one of the most beautiful 
pictures I have seen in Scotland or England. It is 
such a place as we like to think of as the last resting 
place of the great poet of the North. 

Scotland is mountainous, wild, and rugged, beautiful 
with heather, the sheen of lakes, and the profile of high 
mountains; but over all its rugged surface is the 



Land of the " Lady of the Lake " 41 

glamour thrown by the genius of its poets and its novel- 
ists. We never think of Scotland except as the land of 
Burns, Scott, and Watson, and William Black, and all 
its mountains, glens, ,and lakes seem populous with the 
characters who live in perpetual youth, as conceived and 
painted by these great authors. 

We left the Trossachs with regret. Taking the 
stage "Roderick Dhu " at 1.30, and going west over i» 
an outlying ridge or spur of Ben Nevis, we came 
to Loch Katrine, where was a steamer in waiting to 
carry us to the far end of the lake, a distance of about 
five or six miles. After the steamer swung out of its 
dock it very soon passed the little island known as Ellen's 
Isle, and as it went by we gazed on it earnestly and 
longingly, for we felt that just then we were passing 
out of the country of the " Lady of the Lake," out of 
the region enchanted and populated by the genius of the 
Wizard of the North, whose grave we had seen beneath 
the ivied walls on the grassy slope of Dryburgh Abbey. 

We reached Glasgow early this evening, and all the 
evening have heard the newsboys shouting the extras, 
giving an account of the second and most interesting 
race between the Reliance and the Shamrock. The peo- 
ple of Glasgow seemed greatly interested in that race, 
because, as I understand, the Shamrock was built on 
the Clyde, which is the great deep arm of the sea which 
brings the Northern Ocean into the heart of the city 
and to the great wharves, factories, and basins which 
give Glasgow its commercial wealth and importance. 

I do not think they expected the Shamrock to win ; 
and so they accepted the defeat composedly, but had 
the Shamrock won, I think the outburst would have been 



42 London Again, and Windsor 

like that which came after the relief of Ladysmith and 
the capture of Cronje; and since then the Reliance has 
three times outsailed the Shamrock: and as we receive 
the news here, we say " Hurrah for HerreshofF." 



vn 

London Again, and Windsor 

London, W. C, Sept. 2, 190—. 
We had intended to go to Oban and from there sail 
to Skye, Fingal's cave, and the land and waterways that 
we read of in " MacLeod of Dare," and " In Far Loch 
Arbor," two of the most beautiful of the stories of Wil- 
liam Black, but the summer had been cold and rainy be- 
yond precedent. I suppose every Brooklyn man knows 
how the cold and the rain affect Coney Island; and to 
seek a seaside resort in the north, in the last days of a 
cold, rainy summer, seemed hardly wise, and so we 
whirled away nine steady hours of railway travel to 
great and populous London. 

Again we find ourselves in a great city of more than 
six million human beings, and, again, almost as much 
as at first, we are impressed with the size, the needs, the 
wants, the possibilities, and the power of such a vast 
aggregation of human units. 

I suppose everyone who comes to London feels he 
must utilize his time to see all the sights of the great 
town. We had seen Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's 
when first here; and so, on our second visit, we utilized 
the first day to go to the " Hippodrome," a show which 
is very largely advertised, has two performances daily, 



London Again, and Windsor 43 

and claims to rank with Westminster as one of the sights 
of London. The principal attraction of these per- 
formances, as advertised, is " The Redskins," which is 
supposed to give an illustration of frontier life and the 
encounters with pistol and tomahawk between the settler 
and the redskin. This so-called play, with a large 
number of variety performances preceding, was given 
in a theater specially arranged for the purpose. The 
arrangement was similar to what we have in the Academy 
of Music when that is made up for balls, fairs, or sim- 
ilar entertainments. It was as though all the orchestra 
chairs of our Academy of Music were taken out, and a 
ring made there similar to a circus ring, and this ring, 
at the crisis of the play, is flooded with water, its floor 
or base apparently being let down at the same time. 
This water, the play assumes, is a river, into which 
plunge the pursued and pursuers, horses and actors 
alike, men, women, and children, white and copper- 
colored, and swim across it and then drag themselves 
out limp, wet, and cold, and disappear round the wings 
of the stage. The curtain then comes down quickly and 
the play is over. It did not seem to me at all equal to 
Buff^alo Bill's exhibitions, which we have so often in and 
near New York. 

The next day — still impressed with the thought that 
we must see all we can while in London — we went to the 
British Museum. This, I suppose, has the greatest col- 
lection in the world of statuary, tombs, and inscriptions 
from the ancient world — that is, from the world of two 
or three thousand years ago. Here are the marbles of 
the Parthenon, which was built 500 years b. c, and 
burial caskets, profiles, and heads cut in beautiful, hard 



44 London Again, and Windsor 

granite, of kings and emperors from the Egypt of 3000 
years ago. We understood that on the floor above were 
the mummies, the actual bodies of those Egyptian kings 
whose burial cases and monuments we had seen cut in the 
shining brown granite, and all this spoil of royal dynas- 
ties had been brought across the sea to entertain the 
dwellers in a land not known to history until 2000 years 
after the embalmed bodies of these old kings had been 
placed in their finely carved stone coffins. I did not care 
for these Egyptian remains, nor did I ascend the stairs 
to see the mummies, although I understand that there 
is the actual body, embalmed and preserved in mummy 
cloth, of the Pharaoh of the Oppression. I expected 
and tried to be interested in the monuments of Greek 
art, but they failed to interest me. Here are marbles 
of the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythology, cut 
by the chisel of Phidias, and set up to adorn an Athen- 
ian temple of the age of Pericles. 

The next day we went to Windsor, a royal residence, 
and in the chapel, inside the castle inclosure, we saw 
examples of modem marbles, and were very glad that 
our view of the modem came so soon after seeing the 
marbles of Phidias. In the chapel at Windsor is a 
memorial to Princess Charlotte. Princess Charlotte, had 
she lived, would have been Queen, but she died in child- 
birth, and the monument to her, to my mind, is the most 
beautiful that I have seen in England. Its lower part 
represents a couch or bed, on which is a figure covered 
by a sheet, save where the hand, stiff* and rigid with 
death, droops below. Around it are figures of mourn- 
ers, bent in grief and lamentation; this portion of the 
monument represents, with a distinctness almost ter- 



London Again, and Windsor 45 

rible, the victory of death. Above it is a figure in 
marble breaking from the tomb and ascending to heaven 
on joyous wing. The face of this figure breaking from 
the tomb is said to be very like that of the Princess Char- 
lotte; and in the arms of one of the angels is the little 
child, a daughter, I believe, carried with the mother to 
the heaven above. 

Complete as appears the victory of death in the marble 
below, no less complete is the victory over death, as 
represented by the figure thus seen ascending from the 
tomb. I would not be rash to say that this monument 
of Princess Charlotte is comparable, judged by the 
technique of the art, to those old marbles from the Par- 
thenon, but the monument of Charlotte has a great 
theme, undoubtedly the greatest, that can engage the 
energy of human genius. Those remains of ancient art 
doubtless show great skill and beauty, but they seem to 
me to fail, because they had no high theme or purpose. 

I have been in many picture galleries since being in 
England, and in all I find the picture of the Christ, as 
conceived and painted by the greatest of modern 
masters, and when, in mind, I compare the finest remains 
of ancient art with those pictures of the God-man, I 
seem the better to understand the enormous difference 
between the ideals and thoughts before Christ and the 
thoughts and ideals which have filled and conquered the 
world since He lived. 

Windsor Castle is a little way outside London; the 
distance is thirty minutes by train. This was the home 
residence of Queen Victoria, as Osborne and Balmoral 
were her summer residences — one at the seaside, and the 
other in the Scottish hills. Windsor Castle was doubt- 



46 London Again, and Windsor 

less originally a fortification, and its walls and turrets, 
pierced for bowmen and other defending soldiery, are 
very like Warwick Castle ; but, for many hundred years, 
Windsor has been a royal residence, just outside a 
great and wealthy city, and has been embelhshed and 
enriched by all that money could buy or genius produce. 
It is situated on a gentle elevation, from which a fine 
view Is had of the Thames and a beautiful rolling coun- 
try beyond. 

We were taken through banqueting rooms, council 
and presence chambers, and halls of state; there, too, 
was the Waterloo room, adorned with pictures of Well- 
ington, Bliicher, and the great generals and captains 
of that tremendous battle ; but as we walked through 
one of the rooms, on every panel of which was a picture 
of a king or queen. It occurred to me that there was 
another side, even to all this royal magnificence, for two 
of the figures which stood out so richly on that canvas 
represented persons who died on the headsman's block — 
Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots. 

Six miles from Windsor Is the little village and church 
of Stoke Pogls. The ride there was very interesting, 
and characteristically English. Most of the way the 
road was lined with large and venerable trees, and 
these trees were covered, locked, and Interlocked by 
the beautiful, twining English ivy. We stopped In 
front of the entrance to a little country churchyard, 
and, walking a short distance, came to a plain wooden 
church, on which was an Inscription saying that In the 
tomb opposite the Inscription, and In the grave with his 
mother, whom he so loved, lay the remains of the poet, 
Thomas Gray, author of the " Elegy Written in a- 



London Again, and Windsor 47 

Country Churchyard." We went into the church and 
saw the pew which it is said Gray occupied, and, coming 
out, found ourselves under the branches of an old and 
enormous yew tree, with graves swelling to mounds all 
around, and we recalled the verse : 

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade. 
Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap. 
Each in his narrow cell, forever laid. 

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 

Sitting under that old tree, in the few moments that 
we could spare, we looked round on the surrounding 
country. The castle, with its towers and flags, for- 
tunately, was hidden by the intervening trees, and 
around us were the fields and farms of a plain and 
meager rural life. It happened that it was a beautiful 
day, and as we saw the fields and herds, and toiling hus- 
bandmen lighted by the rays of midsummer, we felt 
there was something in the scene consoling and quiet 
that gave rest from labor and from the throbs of effort. 
Whenever again I read Gray's " Elegy " it will be in 
the setting and surrounding of that beautiful summer 
afternoon — seated among those billowy graves, under 
that old yew tree, with those quiet, rural, almost slum- 
berous trees above; and I feel sure that Gray must 
have composed that poem seated right there on the 
evening, or more probably on many evenings, of such 
quiet, peaceful, restful days. 

We have already engaged rooms at a hotel in Paris 
where we are told they understand and speak English ; 
and we expect to go there to-morrow. The Channel is 
said to be so smooth this morning that Holbein is trying 



48 In the French Capital 

to swim across. We reckon from this that we can stand 
the discomforts of a thirty-mile ride on a turbine wheel 
steamboat — though we recollect that the great Napoleon 
did not find it quite easy to get across that little span 
of water. 



VIII 

In the French Capital 

Paris, Sept. 7, 190—. 
We came here four days ago, coming direct from Lon- 
don, and had the first experience of traveling in France. 
Before trunks could be marked through to Paris we 
found it necessary that they should be weighed, and we 
should pay a charge regulated by the weight for their 
transportation on the French railroad. We left Lon- 
don at 11 A. M., coming direct to Dover, and our route 
brought us through the section known as Kent. It was 
a most beautiful country, much more diversified by hills, 
valleys, and waterways than the portion north of Lon- 
don, which we had previously traversed by rail. 

On this journey we saw the hillsides covered with the 
most luxuriant growth of hops, and we realized we were 
looking on the fair Kentish fields, of which, it seems 
to me, I have often read in the song and poetry of Eng- 
land. But the acme of this journey was the crossing of 
the English Channel. We had very often heard of the 
discomfort of the journey across that narrow waterway, 
a little less than thirty-one miles wide. When we were in 
the Trossachs a fellow-traveler almost frightened us 
with his account of his journey across the Channel, on 



In the French Capital 49 

a crowded deck, wet with the spray, and overcome with 
seasickness. His story was very hke many that had 
come to us from friends and acquaintances, even before 
we had thought of visiting Europe ; consequently as our 
train stopped on the Dover wharf we went on board the 
boat with enough apprehension as to the discomfort of 
the voyage to give zest and spice to all its incidents. 

As the boat pushed out from the shore we saw the 
high, perpendicular, chalky cliffs that make the south- 
ern boundaries of England at that point. To the Ro- 
mans these cliffs were albus (the Latin for white), and 
from thence, we suppose, comes the name " Old Albion," 
a very common appellation of England, and as those 
chalky cliffs receded we soon found ourselves midway on 
our Channel voyage, wondering where and when the dis- 
comfort prophesied by our friend of the Trossachs was 
to come in. Soon we saw the French coast, and, observ- 
ing a point of land on our right, which, it seemed to 
me, would soon give us shelter from any current or high 
seas, I felt reassured. 

I ventured to ask one of the officers of the boat 
whether or not the worst part of our voyage was over. 
He assured me it was, and we continued our luncheon 
without further apprehension, and soon found our good 
ship lying alongside the rickety structure called a wharf, 
which extends into the sea from the Calais shore. Our 
voyage and lunch were both over, and the evil prophecies 
of our friend (like most prophecies of evil) had not 
been justified by the event. We now, for the first time, 
found ourselves in a country where the English lan- 
guage, or even good American, spiced with a little 
Yankee brogue, was not understood. Somehow, I hardly 



50 In the French Capital 

know how, we got our hand-bags marked all right by 
the customs officer, and were told that our trunks would 
not be examined by them until we reached Paris. 

Arriving in Paris, a porter appeared to us, talking a 
strange language, and by energetic pantomime offering 
to carry our bags. Overcome by this strange speech, 
we for a moment hesitated ; he took that as assent, and 
at once seized all our bags and similar belongings. I 
ejaculated as fiercely as I could " Custom House officer." 
A smile of comprehension and polite approval overspread 
the countenance of the creature who had taken such 
sudden possession of our bags, and bowing politely, con- 
descendingly, and even approvingly, he ejaculated: 
" Oui, ouiy monsieur I " Assuming that he understood 
me, I had a short but pleasant moment of relief from 
care, when suddenly I looked round for the bags, and 
saw him disappearing down the far end of the station 
with bags and all our personal belongings in his 
hands. We followed as rapidly as we could, and finally 
succeeded in overtaking this wild-eyed, impulsive Franc 
as he stood negotiating with a cabman. He was exhibit- 
ing our bags and pointing us out as we appeared on the 
scene. 

Seeing a man standing by in uniform, in my despair 
I thought to try a little American speech on him, and 
soon discovered that he understood what I said. I ex- 
plained that we did not want a cab, and did not want our 
bags carried away until we had attended to our trunks 
with the customs officer. Thereupon our wild-eyed 
Franc moved swiftly to another room, where the customs 
officers were, where he deposited our bags and belong- 
ings, and, in consideration of a small tip, vanished 



In the French Capital 51 

from the scene, I suppose to inflict himself upon another 
traveler just coming ashore, to whom the language of 
France is like Greek or Sanskrit. I stood guard over 
the bags while Mrs. Johnson was discovering the cus- 
toms officers, who understood a little English. How she 
managed it I know not, but her tact and judgment 
seemed adequate, and very soon another porter, with our 
trunks on a platform truck, stopped for our bags, and 
in a few moments more we had the felicity of seeing the 
whole outfit on the front of a victoria. 

On the seat sat a venerable driver, who looked as 
though he might be a veteran of Waterloo. Taking 
our seats in the victoria, behind our luggage and the 
veteran, I shouted " Hotel St. Petersburg." The vet- 
eran answered " Oui, oui/* whipped up his ancient horse, 
and in a few minutes more we found ourselves in front 
of our hotel. Requesting a porter to settle the bill of 
our veteran cabman, we went inside to find ourselves in 
a hotel where most of the guests were English or Amer- 
ican, and where the English language is understood 
and spoken by the waiters and attendants. In a very 
few minutes after entering we had been shown to a 
room, and were sitting to a plentiful dinner, served by 
English-speaking waiters, and were convinced that 
we had actually made the crossing from London to 
Paris. 

After dinner I strolled to the front of the hotel and 
was there saluted by a lot of wild-eyed Frenchmen, who, 
in pantomime, were offering me the use of the carriages 
by which they stood. In the midst of the uproar a man 
spoke to me in the English language, offering his as- 
sistance, and so welcome, at that moment, was the dear 



52 In the French Capital 

mother tongue that almost before I knew it I had en- 
gaged him — or he had engaged me, I have never been 
able to tell precisely which — for a drive through the city 
on the following day. 

At eleven o'clock on the following day he was 
promptly in attendance, and we found ourselves seated 
in one of those low, open, and very comfortable vic- 
torias with our English-speaking friend of the previous 
evening seated by the driver, interpreting to him our 
wishes and commands and energetically announcing to 
us the different places of interest by which we were pass- 
ing. Almost immediately we found ourselves on a broad 
avenue with broad sidewalks and fine stores on either 
side. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and tables 
for refreshments, liquid and otherwise. 

It was a beautiful sunshiny day, the sidewalks were 
thronged, and we were so near the bright, vivacious mov- 
ing throngs we realized how bright, sparkling, and 
attractive are the streets and avenues of fair, beautiful, 
and historic Paris. 

Our drive soon brought us to a monument rising from 
the center of the avenue. This monument is about 150 
feet high, and is a memorial to deceased soldiers, some 
of whom are placed in the vaults beneath. 

Our guide informed us that it stood on the site of 
the old Bastille, and pointed out a series of large, 
pecuhar stones, placed to indicate the boundaries of 
that old prison. A part of this monument is an enor- 
mous ballot box, guarded by crouching lions, all in 
shiny bronze, and conspicuous on different sides of the 
structure were the words " Egalite, Liberie, Frater- 
nite'* (" EquaHty, Liberty, Fraternity"), and so over 



In the French Capital 53 

the place where stood that stronghold of oppression 
and cruelty are engraved the words which were the war 
cry of the Revolution which swept out of existence the 
Bastille and the kings who erected it. 

From there we passed to the Church of Notre Dame. 
This old historic church was much less imposing out- 
wardly than we had expected ; the guide book explains 
that the church was originally raised above the sur- 
rounding streets, and that these streets have all been 
filled or raised to the level of the entrance of the church, 
which gives an effect as though the church had been 
lowered from the original high level on which it was 
built. 

This church has a strange and curious history, typi- 
cal of the history of the beautiful city in which it stands. 
In the days of the Revolution its altars and sacred 
images were thrown down, and in their place were erected 
statues to Justice and of Reason. Under Napoleon I. 
those statues were removed, and the church was restored 
to its original sacred use, and it so continued until the 
day of the Commune, when it was seized by those wild 
rioters and used by them as a magazine for military 
supplies. When they were finally driven from it they 
set fire to it, but the fire was fortunately extinguished 
before the main structure was much injured. 

One side of the church is set apart, little spaces sepa- 
rated from the aisles by an iron railing and gate. Those 
places are called and used as little chapels, and we were 
told that one or another of them is often selected as 
the place where a marriage ceremony is to be solemnized. 
In most of them we saw marbles, busts, and statues, rep- 
resenting men in priestly garb in attitude of devotion. 



54 In the French Capital 

These, we were told, represented different bishops of 
the Church. 

In another of these little chapels was a very interest- 
ing and quite different monument ; it was in white marble, 
and represented a man with all the comeliness and 
rounded form and limbs of youth, tall and symmetrical 
as an Apollo, with a face of great depth and beauty, 
and very expressive — loving and sweet. He was repre- 
sented as lying down, supporting himself on one arm 
or elbow. The whole attitude and pose was easy, grace- 
ful, and natural. Above that form, on a marble tablet, 
were words in French, which the guide-book translates 
as : " May my blood be the last blood shed." We were 
told that this monument represented the Archbishop of 
Paris, who was murdered there by the Communists in 
1871. He refused to leave the church when the mad 
mob broke in, and dying there his last words were 
those engraved on the marble tablet. Standing by that 
little chapel, it was easy to imagine the whole scene, the 
fire, darkness, and fury of the Commune, demoniac 
forms, male and female, waving torches ^and knives, 
shrieking and thristing for more blood ; and in the midst 
this Apollo form, calm and resigned, this (dying Chris- 
tian, yielding there his life's blood because he deemed 
there was his post of duty and that so he was obedient to 
his Master's will. His story and his monument dignify 
and enrich not only this old historic church, but make 
life itself seem richer and sweeter for such jiobility of 
sacrifice. To-morrow we expect to see the " Louvre " 
and the " Palace of Versailles," the palace of Louis 
XIV., whom the French call the grand monarch. 



Some Residences of French Royalty 55 

IX 

Some Residences of French Royai^ty 

Paris, Sept. 9, 190—. 
The third day after arriving here we made the trip to 
Versailles, a royal residence of Louis XIV., about ten 
miles from Paris. We discarded our guide of the first 
day and secured a driver bom in England who had 
lived twenty-five years in Paris and who was quite fa- 
miliar with everything on the route to Versailles and 
spoke French and English apparently with equal facility. 
We found him a treasure. His information was very 
full and apparently correct. Our route took us first 
to the Champs Elysees, a broad avenue leading from the 
old palace of the Tuileries to the Bois de Boulogne; 
passing under the " Arc de Triomphe," we soon found 
ourselves outside the old walls of Paris and in the 
Boulogne wood. These woods occupy about 2250 acres, 
consequently about three and a half square miles. That 
is equal to a plot a mile in breadth and three and a half 
miles long. This calculation, I think, easily shows that 
this wood is more than four times the size of our Pros- 
pect Park. The trees in it are small, but very thickly 
set, so as to be almost impenetrable. 

Through this dense wood range herds of deer. We 
saw two small herds on a single drive through the park. 
The wood contains lakes, fountains, and waterfalls, all 
artificial, produced by pumping, as they are in Prospect 
Park, and through the wood extend many fine broad ave- 
nues. The one which we took revealed through a break 
in the wood quite a high hill a mile or two to our right. 



56 Some Residences of French Royalty 

This, we were told, was Mount Valerien, on which during 
the siege was erected one of the strongest forts of the 
French and one which they proudly say refused to capit- 
ulate or haul down its flag until peace was declared. 

Leaving the Boulogne wood and crossing the Seine, 
a turn in the road brought us to St. Cloud, which was 
the imperial residence of Napoleon III. This beauti- 
ful park, fronting on the Seine, is about 1000 acres in 
extent. As we ent-ered ^it, making a sharp turn to the 
right, we passed along a terraced wall about twenty 
feet high. This wall, we were told, supported the 
ground where the royal gardens formerly were, and 
where during the siege a German battery was placed 
which day by day bombarded and received the fire of the 
great French fortress on Mount Valerien. During one 
of those fierce cannonades the palace was set on fire and 
entirely consumed, and nothing now remains of its 
former beauty except the park with its beautiful trees 
and fine commanding terraces. As we drove along by 
that terrace wall we noticed some columns or supports 
different from the remainder of the wall, and were told 
that at that point a bridge extended from the second 
story of the palace to this high and beautiful terrace 
garden. Passing along slowly between the site of the 
former palace and this garden, we could but think of 
the tragic changes and mutations that had here taken 
place. 

Here during the summers lived the third Napoleon in 
his prosperous and happy days. Here was the Empress 
Eugenie, Empress of the French and queen of fashion 
for a world. Here had played the young Prince Im- 
perial, heir to an empire and of the Napoleonic name 



Some Residences of French Royalty 57 

and tradition, and here Victoria and Albert came as the 
guests of Napoleon and Eugenie. The past had been 
rich in successes. The eagles of France had fleshed 
their beaks in the Russian bear at Sebastopol. The vic- 
tories over Austria at Magenta and Solf erino were com- 
plete and recent. Napoleon was recognized as the heir 
to the tradition and memories of the great Corsican, and 
the world had almost come to believe that he had in- 
herited much of the military genius of his great-uncle. 
Mexico, Maximilian, and Carlotta, and the tragic stories 
that clustered round their names were then all unknown, 
hidden behind the veil that closes the future from our 
view. No sound of Metz or of Sedan had come to that 
happy, sunny palace. 

But how soon the change was to come. The Emperor 
at the head of his armies was to yield himself a prisoner 
of war; Eugenie was to fly in terror from her palaces, 
and in the chapel at Windsor Castle we had seen the 
marble effigy of the young Prince Imprial, at his feet, 
all carved in marble, the helmet of a British cavalry 
officer, to denote the uniform which he wore when stabbed 
to death in an African forest by savage but brave and 
warlike Zulus. Driving over the ashes of her palace 
home, beset by the memories and the ghosts of so much 
magnificence and glory, my thoughts went out in pity 
to the childless widow at Chiselhurst. 

It is understood by many in England, though I doubt 
whether anyone would positively so assert, that the 
young Prince was loved by the daughter of a Queen 
with a love that made her a daughter to Eugenie when 
her greatest and last bereavement came, and with a love 
that made Victoria and Eugenie sisters in sorrow when 



58 Some Residences of French Royalty 

the news of the tragic end of the young Prince came to 
England. 

Thoughts such as these, or dreams, if you so esteem 
them, flitted across my fancy as we drove through the 
beautiful park, looking at the broad avenues still lined 
by trees, but now grass-grown, entirely unworked and 
untraveled. 

Passing still onward, we came to the old town of Ver- 
sailles. Passing through and beyond it, we came to the 
great park, avenues, ponds, and lakes, the palace for 
himself and the mansion for his mistress which were 
constructed by Louis XIV. The guide book, which 
seems to be very reliable, states that Versailles was 
originally a level sandy plain and that its hills, val- 
le3^s, ponds, and waterways are all artificial, and were 
constructed at an expense almost fabulous. Pass- 
ing the palace itself, we went first to the Trianon, 
which is a low frame building, constructed by Louis 
XIV. as a residence for his mistress, the notorious 
Madame de Maintenon. This building itself is not pre- 
tentious, and there is very little in its history or mem- 
ories that renders it beautiful or attractive. A guide 
hurries us through its many large and plain rooms, and 
shows us a billiard table where he says the first Napoleon 
played billiards. He states that the first Napoleon 
resided here with Josephine while he was First Consul. 
We accept his statement as authentic history; we have 
neither the time nor the facilities to investigate any his- 
torical questions, and are quite willing to believe that 
Josephine, in her fortunate and happy days, strayed 
through these rooms and looked down through those 
long rows of stately trees to the lake flashing brightly 



Some Residences of French Royalty 59 

beyond. The guide brought us to another room, which 
they say was Napoleon's bathroom, and pointed out the 
holes in the floor, through which, he said, came the pipes 
that brought water to supply the bath. 

I did not notice that these holes were in any way 
nailed down, and I commend them to the thoughtful at- 
tention of any relic hunter that may pass that way. 

From there we pass to the house where they kept the 
royal carriages and there saw one on which was em- 
blazoned a large "N." In that we were told the young 
Prince, whose marble effigy we had seen at Windsor, 
was carried, when a babe, to church, to receive the 
baptismal rite. 

From there, after luncheon, we went to the main 
palace ; connected with the palace was a most beautiful 
chapel, the walls and ceilings of which seem alive with 
saints and angels whose figures had been placed there by 
the master painters of the world. On the floor was a 
matting which our guide lifted for a moment to allow us 
to glance underneath while we saw stones and minerals 
of various kinds, which our guide informed us are of 
such value that they keep them covered with matting 
lest they should be stolen. From there we passed into 
the palace itself, a succession of rooms filled with 
the most costly paintings and marbles to proclaim the 
achievements and glories of Louis XIV. of France. 
There we see Louis XIV. crossing the Rhine as the great 
monarch would have it represented. We had seen the 
picture of Washington crossing the Delaware and Na- 
poleon crossing the Alps — and in each we saw a strong 
man contending with and overcoming ,the obstacles of 
nature. But this representation of Louis was quite 



60 Some Residences of French Royalty 

different. There was no river there, but, instead of the 
river, we see the old river god, ancient as the river itself, 
with hair wet and disheveled, with limbs long, lank, and 
cold, lying on the earth, looking up appealingly to the 
great ruler, who steps proudly over him, placing his 
kingly foot, clad in silken hose and slippers, on the form 
of the prostrate and appealing god. Oh, the egotism, 
the effrontery, the bravado, the dare, the challenge to 
fate, of such a picture ! 

We still pass on to other rooms, all filled with great 
paintings, and we note that pictures of the crusaders 
seemed to predominate over all other subjects. We won- 
dered for an instant why the story of the crusaders so 
prevailed in the palace of that voluptuous monarch, 
but we soon discover that there is a certain Louis who 
is always painted as being in front of the crusading 
host, and we see that these pictures were made to glorify 
that Louis, whom they call Saint Louis and who was 
an ancestor of Louis XIV. many hundred years, 
and very many generations removed. Passing rapidly 
through these tawdry and repellent evidences of the 
shameless egotism of Louis XIV., we pass through rooms 
filled with paintings of later periods, principally repre- 
senting the battle between the French and the Arab 
shieks, battles fought for possession of Morocco and 
the desert adjacent. Among many other pictures we 
noticed a picture of the siege of Yorktown, represent- 
ing an individual whom I suppose the French, after 
Artemus Ward, would call G. Washington. This Wash- 
ington in the painting stands a little back, as though 
obscured and abashed by the genius of the great Count 
de Rochambeau, who is supposed to be giving the orders 



Some Residences of French Royalty 61 

for the final assault by which the British garrison and 
army were made prisoners of war. 

We saw but a single reminder or monument of the 
first Napoleon there. It is in marble, representing him 
sitting, emaciated and wasted, as though in his last sick- 
ness and very near his death. It is called, I believe, 
" The Napoleon of St. Helena." Not far away is a 
picture of the deathbed of Thiers, President of France 
in the days of her humiliation and sorrow. By his bed- 
side is a female figure, draped in crape, representing 
France, I suppose, while above is another figure, an 
angel form, hovering as though expectant to receive 
the passing spirit of the great statesman. Coming to 
the front of the palace, we looked out on a wide court 
and a broad avenue, extending direct almost to Paris 
itself. Our guide pointed to a window from which the 
queen, Marie Antoinette, is said to have addressed the 
mob that had come from Paris down that great avenue 
and filled the great courtyard. Just behind the window 
is a narrow wooden door, which, being opened, revealed 
a narrow stairway, hidden in the walls of the building. 
We were told that when the mob surged into the palace 
and up the broad and beautiful state stairway that is 
directly opposite the entrance, the aff^righted queen, 
going hastily down this dark, hidden, and narrow stair- 
way, passed unobserved around or through the fierce 
mob and out to the broad avenue beyond, and so, unat- 
tended and alone through the drear darkness, went on 
to Paris. 

This unhappy and most unfortunate queen was the 
wife of the great grandson of the monarch who had 
represented himself as spurning with his slippered foot 



62 Some Residences of French Royalty 

the river god, and we know that she and her husband, 
queen and king, fled together from Paris, hoping to 
pass the French frontier and secure immunity from 
their own subjects, and that after a day and a night of 
weary journeying they were captured, brought back, 
thrown into prison, and taken thence in rough carts or 
timbrels to a rough board platform, where their lives 
were taken by the guillotine. This last Louis claimed 
the kingship of France because he was the great-grand- 
son of the Louis who spent almost fabulous millions on 
Versailles. The French people, with a rough logic, took 
this great-grandson at his word, saying, " If you in- 
herit his honor you must answer for his crimes," and so 
made bloody expiation for the crimes and follies of the 
long line of kings of that name that had preceded him. 

It is not my purpose to vindicate or condemn the 
course of French history, but going through the pal- 
aces where her rulers lived and erected monuments to 
emblazon their triumphs or their crimes, their tragic 
history and the tragic surroundings seemed to fill their 
stately palaces and their ghosts seemed to walk unbid- 
den in the shade of the great trees that line those 
beautiful avenues. 

All these royal residences are now the property of the 
republic, and so with all their treasures are open to any 
citizen of France that may ask admission. Our day at 
Versailles was instructive and pleasant, but filled with 
memories of the great tragedy which was enacted on a 
stage of which these parks and palaces seemed to be 
but the wings and entrances. 



Traveling in the Swiss Alps 63 



Railroad Traveung in the Swiss Alps 

Lucerne, Switzerland, Oct. 1, 190 — . 
We have been at this place a week, and spent the week 
previous at Interlaken. Our journey from Lausanne to 
Interlaken was by rail, and we found it both instruc- 
tive and interesting. Our train carried us westerly 
along the northern shore of Lake Geneva. The first 
part of our journey was along the side of hills, very 
steep, sloping down to the lake, which had been laid 
out in narrow terraces, each of which is supported by 
heavy retaining walls, I should think about half as high 
as the distance across the terrace. These terraced plots 
were covered with low vines on which is grown a white 
grape, which in a short time will be gathered and taken 
to the wine presses, located at convenient distances along 
the lake. Passing through these vineyards, beautiful 
and inviting with their lustrous burden, apparently al- 
most within our reach from the car windows, we soon 
found we were passing over heavy grades, making our 
way upward in order to reach the summit, and pass out 
of the valley of the lake. 

In the cars here the seats extend from side to side, 
thus giving equal opportunity on each side to view the 
passing landscape. As we sped along, on our right 
was the lake flashing beautiful and blue in the sunlight ; 
and it was very curious to note the diff^erence in the 
mountains on the two sides of the lake. On its farther 
or southerly shore the mountains were jagged, flinty, 
and rocky, bare and hard, practically without vegeta- 



64 Traveling in the Swiss Alps 

tion, while on the northerly shore where we were, the 
mountains, rising frequently to 6000 feet in height, or 
nearly 5000 feet above the lake, were covered with vine- 
yards, grass, and waving trees over nearly all their steep 
slopes ; perhaps it was because these slopes on this side 
were toward the south, and so received greater heat 
from the more direct rays of the sun. This side hill was 
cut by ravines, between which were ridges which seemed 
like ribs or braces supporting the great altitudes 
farther back from the lake. The railroad was carried 
over these ravines by heavy stone bridges. These rocky 
ridges we crossed in deep cuts or tunnels — I think more 
often tunnels. About ten miles from Lausanne, on a 
rock, a short distance out in the lake, which is said to be 
300 feet deep at that place, is a castle built more than 
1000 years ago, in which are rock-hewn dungeons, be- 
neath the level of the waters of the lake, in which are 
shown the torture chamber and the various horrible in- 
struments of torture which had probably been used there. 
This is the castle of Chillon, and is the prison referred 
to in Lord Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon," in which 
occur the familiar Hnes: 

" Chillon ! thy prison is a holy place. 

And thy sad floor and altar — for 'twas trod, 

Until his very steps have left a trace 

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod. 

By Bonivard! May none those marks efface. 
For they appeal from tyranny to God." 

I am sorry to say that I am led to believe that the 
story of cruelty and wrong as told in that well-known 
poem is in the main correct, except that the portion 
which relates that the two brothers of Bonivard is 



Traveling in the Swiss Alps 65 

founded on the sometimes too vivid imagination of the 
poet rather than on fact. We expect to return to 
Lausanne to-morrow, and hope to visit again this old 
castle, rich alike in antiquity, history, and poetic legend. 
Passing through one of these tunnels we were treated 
to a surprise and quick transition, which is one of the 
charms of railway travel in these mountainous regions. 
When we entered the tunnel we were in the valley of the 
Lake of Geneva; when we came out we were in another 
valley, and almost, so it seemed, in another country. 
Looking to our left, instead of steep and frowning 
mountains we saw a valley, comparatively level — sloping 
gently down until it came to low-lying hills, which lay 
along the horizon line. This valley lay so much below 
us that it appeared clear as a map, dotted by houses, 
barns, and hamlets, crossed and recrossed by hard, clear, 
and apparently well-worked and well-fenced roads, dim- 
pled by beautiful lakes, laced and interlaced by streams 
and waterways. Still going onward we soon came to 
Berne, which is the capital of Switzerland. There we 
were given an hour for dinner. Leaving Berne, and 
winding around hills and sharp precipices, we soon found 
ourselves on the shore of a beautiful lake. There are 
two of these lakes through which flows the River Aare, 
and between the two, contiguous to both, is Interlaken, 
where we stopped and found a comfortable hotel, in 
which we remained a week. Looking out from our hotel, 
the Jungfrau stood out clearly before us, nearly 14,000 
feet high, wrapped in a mantle of eternal snow, white and 
spotless as an angel's wing; and there were other moun- 
tains almost as high as the Jungfrau lying thick around 
it, while nearer, just outside the town, is the Schynige 



66 Traveling in the Swiss Alps 

Platte, 6443 feet high, or 4600 feet — almost a mile 
measured perpendicular — ^higher than the little village 
in which we were stopping. On the other side of the 
lake is another mountain, apparently as high as the 
Schynige Platte, and on the side of it, almost at its top, 
is a little chalet, seeming almost overhanging the valley 
below, perched, as it were, on a height so dizzy that it 
would seem that it would tire the eagle's wing to attain 
to it. Below and around it were small fields from which 
the woods had been cleared, and which were apparently 
cultivated or used for pasturage of mountain goats, 
while from the chimney of the hut arose the friendly 
smoke telling us that probably there was being prepared 
the frugal meal of some hardy mountaineer. 

The first afternoon after reaching Interlaken we were 
driven up the road to Murren, where we expected to 
ascend by a mountain railroad, which would lift us to 
a little village about a mile above the level of the sea. 
By an error of the driver with whom we could hold no 
communication (as he spoke only French), we did not go 
up this mountain ; but our ride up that valley was one 
of the most interesting I have ever taken. On each side 
were mountains about 5000 feet high, and probably 2000 
or 3000 feet above the carriage road. Back from these 
adjacent mountains were still higher mountains, rising 
to the region of perpetual snow, from which great banks 
of ice and snow come down to these lower and nearer 
mountains, making and feeding full-growing brooks, 
which came tumbling down the ravines into the small 
river by the side of which was the carriage road ; and 
so steep were these mountains that in some cases, where 
the water flowing from the top did not find a ravine, but 



Traveling in the Swiss Alps 67 

came over the top of the cliff, it would fall sheer and 
clear almost from top to bottom, breaking into spray, 
and almost vanishing before it came to the rock-strewn 
hills beneath. The farther we went the narrower seemed 
to be the valley, and the higher and steeper the moun- 
tains. But as we thus journeyed onward and upward 
for two or three hours, looking up almost in awe at th^ 
great rocky buttresses on either side, sometimes it would 
happen that the mountains were less precipitous ; and 
then, whenever the ascent receded but a little from the 
apparently perpendicular, the hard rocks were covered 
by a scanty soil, which, watered by the moisture from 
above, broke into trees and grassy pastures ; and, gen- 
erally, wherever there was sufficient space, appeared the 
little Swiss chalets, perched irregularly one above an- 
other, each with a little fenced, cleared, and cultivated 
plot around it, while from these little huts arose the 
friendly smoke wreaths, indicating that there were the 
comforts and endearments of family and domestic life. 
I could but think that in such mountain eyries were the 
homes most typical of Swiss life and history ; and that in 
such robust and strenuous surroundings are reared 
the boys and girls, who are to inherit and trans- 
mit the virtues which for so many generations have 
made the Swiss soldiers almost invincible, and left their 
country free and a republic, though surrounded on all 
sides by enormous monarchical conscript armies. 

We lingered at Interlaken longer than was necessary 
to view the different mountains and places of interest 
around there ; but walking or driving there we were be- 
tween great, high mountains rising almost perpendicu- 
lar, and so near by that they seemed almost to over- 



68 Across the Snow-clad Alps 

hang and threaten the valley below. And it seemed to 
me as though these valleys were great canons cut 
through these mountains by prehistoric rivers when the 
world was young; and traversing these valleys, and 
looking up at the rocky buttresses on either side, we 
felt we were near the mystery and heart of the Alps; 
and sometimes it almost seemed as though in the still 
evening we could hear these great neighboring moun- 
tains talking or communing with each other, of the time 
when the " Morning stars sang together." 

Leaving Interlaken for this place we took boat about 
half a mile from the hotel and proceeded to the upper 
end of the lake, a distance of about ten miles ; and all 
the way were the same rocky ramparts on either side, 
rising almost perpendicularly. About half way up the 
lake we passed the Giessbach Falls. At that point a 
stream fed and renewed by the snow, glaciers, and ice 
on the higher mountains, farther back, passing over the 
top of the cliff comes down to the lake by seven succes- 
sive falls ; a mountain railroad operated by cable takes 
the tourist to a point opposite one of the lower falls, 
where there is a very comfortable hotel and electric 
lights which at night are thrown on the seven cataracts, 
making a view wild, unique, and beautiful. 

XI 

Across the Snow-clad Ai.ps 

Lucerne, Savitzerland, Oct. 1, 190 — . 
As we came to the head of the lake we found a train 
awaiting us, in which, finding a place, we proceeded on- 
ward with the same great rocky ramparts on either side. 



Across the Snow-clad Alps 69 

Our way was in a narrow level vaUey rich in vegetation 
and on our right was a small but swift-flowing river 
obviously feeding the lake we had just left, and as I 
supposed coming from the Lake of Lucerne. Our 
tickets gave us the option of making the latter part 
of the journey by rail or by boat on the Lake of 
Lucerne; and I supposed that the Lake of Lucerne 
was little farther up the valley we were traversing, 
and so in comfortable and complacent ease we looked 
out on the rocky walls on either side over which 
other and not infrequent torrents of water were fall- 
ing, as at Giessbach, and behind which at intervals 
we could see the higher mountain covered with snow 
and looking cold and forbidding. As I have said, I 
supposed we were to continue up that valley and between 
these rocky ramparts, but I was very soon undeceived. 
After the train made its first stop, instead of proceed- 
ing onward its movement was reversed, and we seemed 
to be backing away from the station into which we had 
just come. I remarked that we were probably making 
a switch, but I noticed the train was considerably higher 
than the track on which we had come to that station, 
and looking out listlessly I noticed we were still going 
up and apparently hanging on the side of a mountain, 
like that from which we saw the Giessbach tumbling — 
and what was the meaning of this eccentric movement 
of the train .f^ And where were we going .^^ Surely this 
was not the way to Lucerne, and to what dizzy snow- 
clad heights were we being taken? We were going back- 
ward, and perhaps we were going to pick up a passenger 
at the little hut that we saw perched on the side of the 
mountain opposite our hotel ; or perhaps we were to go 



70 Across the Snow-clad Alps 

to some snow-clad summit where we should see all the 
Alps at once, spread like a map below. The conductor 
came along and took our tickets as though nothing un- 
usual were happening. I would have asked him where 
we were going, but he did not understand Enghsh, and 
I could speak in no other language ; and so we concluded 
there was nothing to do but to sit still and wait 
patiently. Of course we considered that railroad com- 
panies were not accustomed to build useless railroads, 
or to waste trains, and we noted that the conductor 
did not seem at all disturbed, and acted as though this 
excursion skyward were one of the ordinary incidents of 
travel. And so we went on and on, higher and higher, 
still perched on the brink of those rocky walls we had 
so admired from the lake below; but soon the railroad 
made a turn from the front of the cliff, and passing up 
over a sharp ridge, the train stopped at a place where 
we found evidences of activity, very homelike and very 
human ; and we concluded that we had not been trans- 
lated into any ethereal region. Getting out of the ;car, 
we walked to a large building near by, where we saw a 
long counter over which foaming beer was being fur- 
nished to thirsty customers ; while around were tables at 
which passengers were busy directing postal cards on 
which were pictures of the railroad winding its way up 
to that place. There was something so homelike and 
reassuring in these occupations that we felt convinced 
that it was all right; and someone who spoke a Httle 
English told us that we had reached the summit and 
were now about to go down. Perhaps some of our 
friends will say I was frightened by this unique experi- 
ence. I protest — ^no, indeed, not at all. I remember 



Across the Snow-clad Alps 71 

that our eminent countryman, Mark Twain, describing 
how he retreated when beset by brigands, protested he 
did not run, but sidled ; and sol protest that I was not 
frightened — but, perhaps — well, a little jolted. We 
subsequently learned that we had crossed the Brunig 
Pass, 1500 feet above the level of the lake and adjacent 
valley. 

And so we went, on and on, and down and down for 
two or three hours, with a new and beautiful valley open- 
ing more and more as we proceeded; soon we reached 
the beautiful lake, where we were told we could take boat 
for Lucerne, but that we could reach this place a little 
sooner by remaining in the train. We concluded to re- 
main in the train and soon passed Mount Pilatus and a 
little later Rigi, and about six o'clock found ourselves 
on a large railroad depot from which we made our way 
to a stage marked " Schweizerhof," which carried us 
quickly by a stone bridge across an arm of the lake, and 
we soon found ourselves in the hotel and in a comfortable 
room looking out on the Lake of Lucerne, or the Lake 
of the Four Cantons, as the Swiss prefer to call it. 

Yesterday we ascended Rigi by a mountain railroad. 
Rigi is so situated that from it is obtained one of the 
best and widest views of this section of the Alps. 

We decided that with the ascent of the Rigi should 
end our excursions and sightseeing at Lucerne. When 
we arrived here it seemed to be too late in the season to 
visit the glaciers ; with that exception we have, I think, 
enjoyed and accomplished all that we expected, or 
hoped for, in this part of our journey. With the com- 
ing of September the trains and other facilities for visit- 
ing the glaciers were diminished ; we have not yet seen 



72 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

Mont Blanc, but we expect to go to Geneva and from 
near or far, as the weather permits, view that highest 
pinnacle of the glorious Alps, and to-morrow we expect 
to end our very pleasant sojourn at Lucerne and the 
Schweizerhof . Purchasing our tickets, we learn that the 
summer express trains have been taken off ; most of the 
hotels here are closed ; the mountains are putting on 
their autumn tints, and the higher are freshly capped 
with snow, and so with the waning season we yield 
to the joyous impulse which comes from the expectancy 
of travel, and leave Lucerne and these grand and 
glorious mountains, except as we may be able to see 
one, and the highest and grandest of them all, in the 
vicinity of Geneva. 

XII 

Mont Blanc as Seen from Lake Geneva 

Geneva, Switzerland, Nov. 4, 190 — . 
We came here Tuesday, a week ago yesterday, making 
the journey from Lausanne down Lake Geneva in about 
three hours. The lake is from two to about six miles 
wide. On the south shore were the abrupt and rocky 
Alpine ranges ; on the north less precipitous slopes, opu- 
lent with vineyards, trees, and other foliage, through 
which were seen beautiful and artistic villas. On the 
deck of the boat was a little cabin enclosed with glass, 
which left the view open on all sides, and at the same 
time broke the wind, which, though gentle, at this season 
of the year is a little cool. Our boat came to the dock 
at Geneva at six o'clock. About half an hour before 
our arrival we had so far rounded the near-by rocky 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 73 

summit that we were able to see Mont Blanc, covered by 
snow, high, grand, and conspicuous in its far-off outline. 

The sun was just setting, and the lake and the boat 
and all the near-by hills, though some of them quite high, 
were in the great shadow which had come as a courier 
of the approaching darkness. But Mont Blanc, high 
and supreme over all, was still bathed in the sunlight, 
which seemed to linger caressingly upon its great snow- 
clad summit. While we were yet in the first thrill of 
pleasure at the sight of this king among mountains, the 
light around the summit seemed to change; purple 
gleams seemed to dance and glide across the white 
slopes, and to encircle and enclose in a beautiful glow 
of alternating light the great white central cone. 

I was called away for a moment by some care for our 
baggage and for landing, and when I returned the glow 
was less vivid in tint and less complete over and around 
the entire summit, and in a moment more it had dis- 
appeared, and the great white slopes stood pale and 
clear; the glamour and the purple Alpine glory were 
all gone, and there only remained the pale majestic fore- 
head from which the hght and life had departed. In a 
few moments more our boat came to the dock, and dark- 
ness came down. The following day it was cloudy, and 
we have not seen the great mountain but once since, and 
that was four days later, and we looked in vain for the 
glory of that Alpine glow, which, in its perfection of 
beauty, we probably shall never see again. But in our 
memories Mont Blanc will always be clothed and crowned 
with the lambent light which played around it, when 
first its towering summit was revealed to our view. 

Geneva is a curious old city. It has a history that 



74 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

goes back to the beginning of the Christian era ; it was 
known to Caesar, and is mentioned by him in his Com- 
mentaries. On a little island near our hotel, called 
Rousseau Island, is a bronze statue of Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, the great French orator and writer on the 
" Philosophy of Government." In a little villa on the 
north shore of the lake lived and died Voltaire, one of 
the great free-thinkers of the revolutionary epoch of 
France. Near by is another villa where Mme. de Stael 
lived, when driven from Paris by the first Napoleon ; and 
there, " life's fitful fever over," she found a grave and 
resting place among the vine-clad hills and verdant 
sunny slopes of the foothills of the Juras, caressed by 
the clear blue waters of Lake Leman. On these same 
slopes, though a little farther out of the city, Byron had 
a villa : he kept a yacht on the lake, in which, acting as 
his own navigator, he sailed. But perhaps the best 
known of all the citizens of Geneva was John Calvin, the 
expounder and enforcer of a system of theology which 
profoundly affected the Protestant world for hundreds 
of years. The place of his abode is still shown to 
visitors, though the house in which he lived has long 
since disappeared, and the one on which we see the tablet 
is a house constructed on the site of the old and long- 
crumbled mansion in which Calvin lived. It seemed to 
me like the house in Edinburgh, on which I saw a tablet 
telling that there once lived the father of WilHam Glad- 
stone. 

These European cities cherish and preserve the mem- 
ory of their great men, and Geneva is fortunate in hav- 
ing had many great ones whose life-work and record 
make the city memorable. Here was held the first great 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 75 

Court of Arbitration, in which the award of fifteen and 
a half millions was made for the Alabama Claims, and in 
a little room in the municipal building, which looks as 
though it might be a common council chamber, we are 
told that great Court of Arbitration was held. The 
fact that the court was organized and did its first work 
satisfactorily and effectively, so as to settle differences 
and establish peace between two great nations, was a 
victory greater than Waterloo or Leipzig. And as I 
stood in that little chamber it seemed to me that I was 
at one of the benignant chapels and places of rest which 
sometimes appear on the cold mountain ridges of his- 
tory. And not unlike in significance is the fact that in 
this little city was the birthplace and is the home of the 
Red Cross Society, and it is because of a convention 
which was held here that wherever that blood-red cross 
is seen the storm of battle is turned aside, and immunity 
is given to the wounded and dying who lie beneath its 
protecting signal. Is it not as though, above the war- 
fare of nations, the clash of creeds, and all the winds 
and waves of angry strife, there was still heard the 
gentle voice, " Peace, be still ! " 

Geneva is situated at the lower end of the lake, which, 
fed by the Rhone at its upper end, discharges its waters 
into the Rhone again, just below the city, where it soon 
meets the Arve, fed and swollen by the great glaciers 
that lie around Mont Blanc. And the Arve and the 
Rhone, the first gray and the latter deeply and distinctly 
blue, in joint compulsive flood, sweeping onward to join 
the blue Mediterranean at Marseilles, seem to preserve 
the distinctive coloring of the two separate streams, side 
by side, in the same bed, far below the point of junction. 



76 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

Coming from Lucerne we rested a couple of weeks at 
Lausanne, the point at which we first entered the Alpine 
region. The day before we came here we took the train 
along the shore of the lake to Montreaux and Chillon, 
and went over the famous Castle of Chillon, the scene of 
the action of Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon." There 
we saw the rock-hewn chamber where Bonivard lan- 
guished for seven years, most of the time in chains. 
Going down a steep narrow stone stairway we entered 
a small chamber which is called the condemned cell, and 
just beyond that, and between it and the chamber in 
which Bonivard was confirmed, is another chamber in 
which we saw a projecting beam, which we were told 
was the rude but effective gibbet used for executions ; 
and in front of it was the high, narrow window, through 
which, it is said, the corpses were thrown out into the 
lake. 

All these chambers are rock-hewn, with rocky base 
and sides ; and the castle is altogether gloomy, sad, and 
cruel. Near by we were shown some photographic views, 
one of which, representing the monument to the Austrian 
Empress, caused us to see that monument, which is not 
far from the little railway station at which we took the 
train back to Lausanne. Going down past the station, 
just outside the little cemetery we saw a beautiful statue 
cut in stone, representing a lady, tall and stately, the 
very embodiment of a sweet and gentle dignity, with a 
royal, richly wrought, and decorated cape falling from 
her shoulders, the figure, robe, and decorations all being 
cut in clear white marble; and this we were told repre- 
sented the Empress who, spending her summer at Mon- 
treaux, took boat to Geneva to visit a friend and was 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 77 

there stabbed by a miserable miscreant, who, ^escaping 
capital punishment because the death penalty is abol- 
ished at Geneva, still lives to pollute the »air of the city 
of the Red Cross Society. And is it not time that 
the United States passed some law for the punish- 
ment of Presidential assassins which will place such dire 
offenses within the jurisdiction of Federal law and no 
longer leave them to the accident of local law or local 
prosecution ? 

I have read somewhere, I think probably at the time 
of the poor lady's death, of the romance of her mar- 
riage, and the story, as I recollect, was that a marriage 
was contemplated between her elder sister and the 
present Emperor, then the Crown Prince of Austria, and 
that the Prince, coming to meet his prospective bride, 
was riding through the grounds that surround the castle, 
when he saw a beautiful young girl walking beneath the 
old trees. And that on coming to the castle he asked 
who she was, and requested and procured that the girl 
should be presented to him ; and this was the younger 
sister of his prospective bride — a romping, careless, 
beautiful girl, who had no thought of marriage, and 
least of all a marriage that should call her to the Impe- 
rial throne of the Hapsburgs ; but it was a case of love — 
mutual love — at first sight, and the young Elisabeth — 
the younger sister — became Elisabeth Empress of Aus- 
tria. And her life was a long benefaction to her lover, 
to the Empire, and to the poor who came within her 
knowledge. The poor lady was almost heart-broken 
when her son Rudolph was found dead, the victim, ap- 
parently, of a love stronger than his love for life. Poor, 
sweet lady, I still see her as she was revealed to me by 



78 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

the marble in the lone churchyard, and I, a stranger, 
would, if it were permitted, lay a wreath of American 
wild flowers upon her grave. 

We left the Schweizerhof now about a month ago, and 
thinking of Lucerne, I feel obliged to say another word 
about that delightful sojourn, and of the memories of 
the great mountains that lay around us. The Schweiz- 
erhof is a great, luxurious summer villa, the largest hotel 
in the beautiful town ; it nestles between the lake and the 
great hills that rise along its shores. Imagine a little 
section of bright, sparkling Paris, or of the upper part 
of New York, sa^^ the Waldorf-Astoria section, set 
down amid the gorges of great mountains mirrored in 
the cold blue waters of a glacier-fed lake, supplied with 
all that the railway can bring or electricity furnish of 
modern comfort and luxury, with throngs of waiters and 
attendants willing and educated to supply every need, 
and that is what Lucerne seemed to me — a very lotus- 
land where we drink the cup of rest and indolent content. 
Every afternoon and evening we had a concert from a 
fine orchestra stationed on the piazza of the hotel. One 
day we were discussing Venice, and whether or not we 
should go there, when I pointed to the lake directly in 
front and said, " What can Venice have more than 
that.? " There were two or three great steamboats, like 
huge argosies laden with passengers, going up and down 
the lake, stopping near the hotel at convenient intervals, 
reminding of the tale of the Eastern sage, who journeyed 
to the Far West, where he saw: 

" Sailless ships upon the ocean 
On to distant regions hied, 
Freighted like to floating cities, 
Careless of the wind or tide." 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 79 

There, too, were little rowboats coming and going, 
shooting in and out from shore to shore, and then the 
larger steam or electric launches, each bearing man and 
maid, pushing farther out around the rocky head- 
lands and away into the great arms of the lake, clasped 
around and overshadowed by gaunt and mighty moun- 
tains. 

And have we no novelist or poet to do for that beauti- 
ful region what Scott and Watson (Ian Maclaren) and 
Black have done for Scotland? Some genius who will 
people it with the creations of fancy, never to grow old, 
but to endure, in perpetual youth, as long as romance 
and thoughts of love and gentle valor captivate the 
heart ? 

Around the great arms of the lake are the mighty 
mountains, and farther back and in their valleys and 
gorges are the great frozen rivers, glaciers, pouring 
forth the icy waters which feed and supply the lake and 
rivers ; and beyond the glaciers are the great, gaunt 
shoulders and pinnacles, extending two or three miles 
into the air, robed in mantles of spotless snow, from 
which come down the frequent avalanches feeding and 
forming the glaciers, and so supplying the lake and 
river. 

A work on the geology of the Alps, that I am now 
reading, tells me that when they were boring the great 
St. Gothard tunnel, from far within the mountain be- 
yond the tunnel, the workmen heard noises as of explo- 
sions, and sometimes from the rocky roof above great 
masses of rock would shake off and tumble down into 
the tunnel. 

Is there no sculptor, painter, or poet who will give us 



80 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

the picture of the genius or god of this great mountain 
range, disturbed in his slumbers by the drill and the 
blasting dynamite, rousing himself, and in a voice that 
seems like thunder asking, " Who is it that comes to dis- 
turb me in my sleep ? " 

And is there no mountain but Pilatus that has its 
myth or legend, strange and weird, touching on history 
both sacred and profane? On the cloud enveloped sum- 
mit of Pilatus there is a small, deep, dark lake, and 
the tradition is that Pontius Pilate, torn by anguish, 
drowned himself in that dark pool, and that at certain 
intervals his spirit is seen emerging from it, and wash- 
ing his hands ever and again in those mysterious waters. 
So the story appears in the guide books, and, also, 
though in a slightly different form, in the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. 

Are there no stories, myth, or history of mountain 
hardihood save that of William Tell ; and in all the fierce, 
desperate battles waged in the dark gorges and forests 
of these great mountains were there none besides Arnold 
von Winkelried, who, making his body a sheath for the 
spearheads of his foes, cried, " Make way for liberty ! " 
What a region for poetry and song are those great 
mountains, — with the hardy mountaineers forcing a 
scanty sustenance from churlish soil, pasturing their 
cattle on the upland Alpine slopes, where the avalanches 
are breaking in thunder all around them. Longfellow 
seemed to catch the glow, the spirit of the mountains, in 
his lines entitled " Excelsior " : 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 81 

" Beware the pine-tree's withered branch, 
Beware the awful avalanche ! " 
This was the peasant's last " Good night ! " 
A voice replied, far up the height, 
"Excelsior!" 



There in the twilight cold and gray, 
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay; 
And from the sky, serene and far, 
A voice fell, like a falling star, 

" Excelsior ! " 



Now if the Alpine harp, when touched by the hand of 
a master — though apparently casually and at random — 
could produce such music, what may we not expect when 
some great master, some Longfellow, Scott, or Tenny- 
son, shall take up that harp to bring out all the music 
of which it is capable? 

Oh, that some such great poet would make his home 
and lif ework in these great mountain regions ; should we 
not then have poetry, new, original, and beautiful, as 
though caught from the Music of the Spheres ? 

And sometimes, perhaps, when we cease to build gal- 
leries to house the works of mere mixers of pigments, and 
to admire painters whose only title to excellence is that 
they can represent colors that are the wonder and de- 
spair of milliners ; when we require and have artists that 
have more imagination than a photograph, and more 
originality than a fashion-plate, then, perhaps, someone, 
looking down into one of these great gulfs between the 
mountains, when it is smitten by the first ray of the 
rising sun, reflected from some far-off snow-white pin- 
nacle, will see, in the vanishing gloom, the defeat and 
rout of the demons of Darkness ; and in the Alpine glow 



82 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

will see the trailing of celestial garments or the glow 
and radiance of a celestial city. 

And, though I leave the Alps, I shall not leave their 
memory ; but that shall go with me, clear and roseate as 
an Alpine glow, to be called back to mental vision " when 
days are dark and drear ! " 



When I came here my letters from home had been 
delayed, and I had a feeling almost perhaps of home- 
sickness. From reading the Paris edition of the New 
York Herald, which we receive here the day after it is 
published, I had been able to obtain little glimpses of 
information from Brooklyn and New York, and knew 
who were the candidates for Mayor, and had learned 
how the betting stood on Low and McClellan, and that 
was about all that I could learn of the great conflict 
that was going on over there. When I came to this 
larger city it seemed to me I should be able to obtain 
some American papers, and for that purpose I called 
on the American Consul here, thinking there would be 
some American papers that I might have the oppor- 
tunity to read ; but I found no American papers there 
except — well, papers that I do not read at home. Sit- 
ting in my room that afternoon there was brought to 
me The Standard Union of Wednesday, October 21. 
The paper was then two weeks old, having been sent to 
my correspondents in London and remailed to me from 
there. But I do not think I have ever received or read 
a newspaper with greater pleasure. It seemed to me 



Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 83 

like a voice from home, a touch of home scenes, and home 
life amid far and strange surroundings. I read the 
news, I read the editorials, I read many of the adver- 
tisements, and I think I even glanced over the society 
news. It was all so homelike and so natural that it 
was elating and refreshing. One page was given to 
the great Fusion meeting held at the Rink the evening 
before. And on that page I saw not only the speeches, 
but the rapid, graphic sketch-pictures of the different 
speakers. It seemed to me almost as though I could 
hear their eloquent appeals, and the thunder of ap- 
plause and commendation from that great audience, 
men and women, of Brooklyn's best citizenship, crowding 
that great building. Noting how many of the speakers 
were unknown to me, I realized that it was a long time 
since I dropped out of the procession, but, at least, I 
had the satisfaction of feeling that for many years, and 
as long as my strength lasted, I had done — no matter 
what — the best I could. 

One of the papers I had read at the Consul's office 
stated that Jerome encountered a frost at that meeting, 
and that the audience left him. As I read the full and 
better account in The Standard Union I knew that that 
statement was not correct. No speaker who makes a 
speech after ten o'clock to an audience that for two 
hours has been at a high tension of excitement can hold 
the entire audience, and generally the speaker congratu- 
lates himself if he holds any. 

As I read the story of that meeting there came to 
my mind the scene on the night when McKinley, coming 
out of the West, made his first bow to a Brooklyn audi- 
ence. Commencing his speech in a voice so low as to 



84 Mont Blanc from Lake Geneva 

be hardly audible on the platform, it soon swelled to 
higher tones, strong and rich in compass, filling the 
entire building, holding a vast audience in rapt atten- 
tion, for two full hours, his voice clear and vigorous 
in every sentence to the end. And then the great meet- 
ing, when Roosevelt, about to be elected Governor, came 
to the Rink. And then another meeting, when the nomi- 
nation for Mayor was tendered to Charles A. Schieren — 
not by Republicans only, but by the Shepard Democ- 
racy, as we then called them — ^by the Young Men's 
Democratic Club and by the German- American Democ- 
racy. That was Fusion on broad lines, and when these 
nomination were made and the candidates had accepted, 
a great movement had been inaugurated and success 
was practically almost assured; and thence came a vic- 
tory which not only elected a Mayor and a Supreme 
Court Judge, but made the State Republican for the 
first time, I think, in ten years. 

Reading your paper, Mr. Editor, was like having 
before me the moving picture of everyday life in Brook- 
lyn. It was so full, so free, so sketchy and so piquant ; 
and I am very glad to join the procession and to have 
my reminiscences and ruminations goi out in such a 
paper to 150,000 Brooklyn readers. 

About all the papers I am able to read here are the 
English papers. The London papers, of course, are 
great newspapers ; but I think they lack the vivacious, 
snappy, newsy " go " of the American papers. But 
the London evening papers are not at all comparable 
with the evening papers of Brooklyn and New York. 
Our evening papers are more and more taking the place 
of their generally larger and older brethren, the morn- 



Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 85 

ing papers. But this is not so in London. There the 
morning newspaper is the paper, and the evening paper 
is rather an afterthought, like a cigar after dinner, 
pleasant, but not essential. And so I say to Brooklyn's 
leading evening paper, as Daniel Webster said to the 
young lawyer, " There is plenty of room in the attic ! " 
"Excelsior!" 

As I complete this letter I have heard of the result 
of the election. It is a far-reaching victory for Tam- 
many — ^but where and whom will it reach.? Perhaps 
we can see, or only dimly guess ; and I am quite willing 
— and, willing or not, shall have — to wait until the 
curtain of the future is withdrawn. 

It is very foggy and cloudy here, so much so that I 
have been unable to see Mont Blanc again. So, being 
in mist and fog in far-away Geneva, I will attempt no 
prophecy, except the prophecy of The Standard Union, 
and that in a single word — " Excelsior " ! 



XIII 

Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 

We went to Lausanne from Paris, making the trip in 
about eight hours, across France, to Lausanne, a city 
of about 50,000 inhabitants, situated within the outer 
lines of the Alps. In the rear of the hotel is a beautiful 
terrace, adorned by trees and plants and overlooking 
the beautiful Lake of Geneva, which is seen blue and 
brilliant at the foot of the hill about a quarter of a 
mile away, and some hundred feet lower than the ter- 
race from which we view it; and beyond the lake, sheer 



86 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 

and bare, rise the sharply serrated ridges of the Alps, 
5000 feet high. 

We are told that on that terrace Gibbon wrote his 
great history of " The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire." In one of the sitting-rooms of the hotel is a 
fine portrait of the great historian, and that, coupled 
with the name of the hotel (Hotel Gibbon), in my pres- 
ent mood, I take as proof conclusive that here, where 
we sip our coffee and smoke our cigar, the great histo- 
rian unraveled a snarl of the skein of history, and, out 
of the tangle of successive and apparently disconnected 
crimes and tragedies, evolved the story of the decay and 
fall of the great Roman empire. 

We delayed our departure from Paris in order to re- 
main there over Tuesday, which is one of the days on 
which the public are admitted to a view of the tomb 
and last resting place of the First Napoleon. Start- 
ing from our hotel, we directed our driver to first take 
us to the Place Vendome, that we might have another 
view of the great Vendome column, which was erected 
by the great Napoleon to commemorate his victories over 
Russia and Austria in the Austerlitz campaign. The 
column, surmounted by a statue of the great emperor, is 
142 feet high; its exterior is of metal, in appearance 
bronze, said to have been obtained by melting down 
twelve hundred Russian and Austrian cannon captured 
in that campaign. Its exterior consists of metal plates 
forming a spiral band reaching from the bottom to the 
top, on which are represented memorable events in that 
campaign. The first drive we took in Paris we drove 
to see that column, and in this, which we expect to be 
our last ride there, we go to view again the column sur- 



Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 87 

mounted by the statue of the emperor and the tomb 
where his remains are laid. 

I remember, as though it were yesterday, when I first 
read or knew of Austerhtz. Sitting in an upper cham- 
ber in the house of a relative, on one of those long after- 
noons that come to boys in the country, and looking 
through the reading matter there, I found a copy of 
Harper's Magazine, containing an account of the bat- 
tle of Austerlitz, as written by J. S. C. Abbott, who was 
then writing the life of Napoleon. The pages were 
illuminated by a picture of the great cavalry charge 
led by the dashing Murat, which shattered the center 
of the allied armies and gave Napoleon the victory, 
which caused Lord Chatham (the elder Pitt) to say: 
" Roll up the map of Europe ; we shall not need it for 
twenty years." I have just been rereading " David 
Harum," who, explaining that he was a growing boy, 
describes how he devoured and relished ginger bread at 
the country circus. The appetite with which David de- 
voured that ginger bread was like, though inferior to, 
the appetite with which I read, devoured, the story of 
that battle as told by Abbott's facile pen, illustrated by 
the intelligent liberality of the Harpers. As David says, 
I was a growing boy then — it must have been more than 
fifty years ago, but I remember it as distinctly as if it 
were yesterday. From that I formed the design to ac- 
quire and own Abbott's life of Napoleon, and com- 
menced to " save money " for that purpose. How well 
I remember that little hoard! A great Mexican silver 
dollar, with a sunburst on one side of it, was its base, and 
for a long time its principal part. I believe that after 
a while, David Harum, having all the ginger bread he 



88 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 

wanted, cared less for ginger bread, but he never quite 
forgot the appetite with which he devoured two great 
cakes of ginger bread in a country circus ; later I had 
all the books I wished to read, but first and foremost, 
for a long time, I sought the story of Napoleon, and I 
do not think I have since read anything with the zest 
and interest with which I devoured the story of Auster- 
litz in that old, but then new, magazine, which I had 
pulled out from under a great heap of books, maga- 
zines, and rubbish that lay in a little closet opening out 
of the room in which I was sitting. 

And when in a httle district school, at the top of Ver- 
mont hill, where I used to stand up In the class and 
read from the Fourth Reader, we had these lines : 

" His falchion flashed along the Nile, 
His hosts he led o'er Alpine snows, 
O'er Moscow's towers, that blazed the while. 
His eagle flag unrolled — and froze." 

I thought that that was very grand poetry In those 
days ; perhaps I have changed my mind a little as to that 
poetry and the character and life work of the great 
emperor ; but if those short lines are not Mlltonic, they 
are at least clear and forcible, and I know of no four 
lines that contain a more graphic statement of the mar- 
velous vicissitudes in the life of the great Corslcan. 
Haunted by thoughts and memories such as these, I 
looked up at that great column, and at the strong, well- 
poised figure at the top ; and from there we drove down 
the Boulevard, past the Tullerles, where Napoleon, while 
Emperor, lived with Josephine, and, after his divorce, 
with the Austrian princess, Marie-Louise. From there 
we soon came to the Champs Elysees, and both on our 



Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 89 

left and on our right we saw a triumphal arch, both 
initiated or constructed by Napoleon. The lesser arch, 
the one on our left, is not unlike, in general appearance, 
the triumphal arch in the plaza of our Prospect Park. 
Like the Park arch, it is surmounted by horses and 
chariots of victory, and it stands just at the entrance 
of the gardens of the Tuileries. The other arch is at 
the other end of the Champs Ely sees and just outside 
of the Boulogne wood. That is the largest triumphal 
arch in existence ; it is visible from almost every part 
of the environs of Paris, and within it are inscribed the 
names of battles and victories of the great emperor: 
Marengo, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Rivoli, and names 
like these break through the gloom of the interior arch- 
way. On its front and rear are groups of figures, gi- 
gantic in size, representing different events in the wars 
of the emperor. 

As we go up the great avenue connecting these two 
arches we see far ahead, and across the Seine, a great, 
gilded dome, rising conspicuously over all surrounding 
objects, and toward that we take our way, and soon find 
ourselves in front of a high building, which we approach 
over a gravel walk. Entering, we see a man on our 
right, presumably an invalid soldier, whose blue coat is 
adorned with bronze eagles and medals, who quietly 
motions us to proceed. Proceeding silently and slowly, 
looking almost unconsciously for some great monument 
which we imagine would indicate the last resting place 
of the emperor, we see in front of us only a stone railing 
two or three feet in height ; seeing another attendant in 
similar uniform adorned with medals and eagles, in dumb 
pantomime we ask whether or not we should pass around 



90 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 

this stone railing. He motions gently to us, a motion 
which leads us to go up to the railing, and there, look- 
ing down over it, we see, as it were, a great inverted 
dome, or bowl of gigantic size, directly under the great 
gilded dome which we had seen from the other side of the 
Seine, and in that great inverted dome, or bowl, we see 
a piece of highly polished and beautifully wrought dark 
brown granite, and immediately we recognize that we are 
looking on the granite sarcophagus which contains the 
mortal remains of the great emperor. 

The man who waited on the cigar stand of our hotel 
spoke good English, and, besides that, had been in 
America. I found it very pleasant to talk with him. 
He told me that when plans were invited for the tomb of 
Napoleon three hundred were submitted, and two hun- 
dred and ninety-nine of them proposed something con- 
structed or built upward like a shaft or monument, and 
that a single one of them proposed this great opening 
and substructure, under that great gilded dome, and 
that the committee unanimously chose the one proposing 
this opening and substructure, and the result is a tomb 
and resting place unique, original, unlike all others, as 
is the history and career of the great Napoleon. Na- 
poleon died at St. Helena in 1821. In 1840, when a 
Bourbon king was ruler of France (Louis Philippe, I 
think), his remains were brought from St. Helena and 
deposited in that tomb under that great golden dome. 
As I recollect, I have read somewhere, but I am not able 
to verify the statement, because I cannot find the books 
here, except in French, that when the barge laden with 
the remains of Napoleon was coming up the Seine, and 
was expected soon to land, this Bourbon king, with his 



Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 91 

princes, sons, and brothers, bedecked and decorated as 
such puppets usually are, were in waiting, in the room 
where that tomb was constructed, when suddenly the 
great doors were thrown open and an old soldier, en- 
tering and saluting, said : " Sire, the Emperor," and 
immediately the plumes and hats were removed from the 
heads of that princely throng, and they stood uncovered 
while the great Napoleon finished his last triumphal 
march, as he was borne past them to his stately tomb 
under that great gilded dome. 

The building where is this tomb is one of a large 
number of buildings surrounding a large open court, 
constructed and intended as a hospital or home for old 
or invalid soldiers, and appropriately called Hotel des 
Invalides. In it is a museum containing weapons of 
warfare new and old, from the short sword and the 
shield of the Roman legionaries to the rifled cannon and 
breech-loading rifles of the present day, and so the 
great emperor takes his last sleep surrounded by all the 
paraphernalia and implements of war, and doubtless, so 
long as any of them survive, surrounded by the soldiers 
who fought at the Pyramids of Egypt, or in sight of the 
spires and pinnacles of Moscow, or in some of the two 
hundred battles, fierce and bloody, that lay between. 

Having looked down into that tomb under that great 
gilded dome, we took carriage to return to our hotel. 
Crossing the Seine, we soon came to the great avenue 
which connects the two great triumphaj arches, but the 
Germans had been there, and, as they thought, had 
squared the account of Jena and Marengo. From there 
we passed by the Tuileries, but they had been burned 
by the Commune, and but partially rebuilt, and they 



92 Napoleon's Tomb in Paris 

are entirely unoccupied, except for one of the minor 
public offices. The destruction of so much of the Tuil- 
eries lays open a great interior court, where the emperor 
walked with Josephine and Marie-Louise, and where his 
son, styled King of Rome, had his playground. That 
interior is now a flower garden, open to the public and 
largely frequented, as is said, by children and nurses. 
Even that great Vendome column was thrown down by 
the Commune, and it now stands as restored by the 
Republic. 

France seems prosperous and happy under the Re- 
public, and it does not seem to me probable, or possible, 
that another Napoleon will come to the throne of France. 
The son of the great emperor languished at the Austrian 
court and died of consumption early in life. We had 
seen the effigy of the son of the third Napoleon in the 
royal chapel at Windsor. The Napoleonic line, so far 
as the probable claimants to the throne, seems to be 
extinct. It seems to me that those who believe there is 
a Providence that rules in the affairs of men (and I am 
one who so believe), may well believe that Providence 
has interposed to overthrow the emperors, and to prevent 
other emperors coming to the throne of France. I have 
written how the story of Napoleon captivated my youth- 
ful fancy, but sitting on the other side of life, perhaps 
in the Indian summer of my days, I look at the history 
of Napoleon quite differently. I have written of my 
visit to the country of the " Lady of the Lake," and to 
the grave of Scott at beautiful Dryburgh Abbey ; and 
to me now more beautiful and admirable seems the life- 
work and memory of Sir Walter Scott than the career 
and achievements, splendid and dazzling though they 
were, of the great Napoleon ; and to me sweeter and 



French Peasants on Market Days 93 

dearer memories will always cluster around that simple 
grave beneath the roof of the old Abbey, almost hidden 
by twining ivies and ancient trees, than around the 
grand resting place provided by a nation under the 
gilded dome of the Hotel des Invalides. 

XIV 

French Peasants on Market Days 

Nice, France, Dec. 1, 190 — . 
We left Geneva three weeks ago yesterday, and after 
journeying more or less for three days found ourselves 
at Nice, one of the best-known and most attractive cities 
in the far-famed Riviera. 

Our journey commenced at 10 a. m., and with a few 
puffs of the engine we were out of the depot and had 
rounded a curve that carried us out of Geneva, and out 
of view of the beautiful lake, and out of all the scenery 
within the view and horizon of glorious Mont Blanc. 
As we left the city we found ourselves swiftly coursing 
down the Rhone. Passing the point where the Arve, 
swollen by glaciers, discharges its icy waters into the 
Rhone, we noted how the blue of the Rhone and the 
gray of the Arve flowed side by side for many miles, as 
though separated by some impalpable barrier. Soon 
the train stopped at the point where the railroad enters 
France, and it was necessary to have our baggage 
passed by the customs officials. This caused a little de- 
lay, but no inconvenience, and very soon there was a 
chalk mark on each of our bags and trunks which indi- 
cated that they had the right of entry into the bright, 
sunny, and inviting land of the great French Republic. 

After about five hours of railway travel we found 



94 French Peasants on Market Days 

ourselves in Lyons, a city of over 400,000 population, 
situated in the central portion of France. Having se- 
cured accommodation at a hotel — quite imposing, and 
very excellent except that the cooking was abominable 
— we strolled out on to the adjacent street, and soon 
found ourselves passing a great public square, in the 
center of which was a large equestrian bronze statue 
of Louis XIV., whom the French call " The Great Mon- 
arch." At Versailles we had seen evidence of his 
egotism, pride, vainglory, and prodigal profligacy, and 
I wondered if even into that ear of bronze no raven 
croaked of the expiation that was to be demanded in the 
blood of the French Revolution. Looking out from the 
window of the very comfortable and commodious room in 
which we were lodged, right in front of us was the 
Rhone, the river which had been our companion all the 
way from Geneva, but there, instead of running wildly 
and rapidly, it seemed to move smoothly and slowly ; and 
along its banks were piers and abutments of stone to 
which were moored light pleasure boats, and long and 
heavy freight carriers, and then we learned that a canal 
had been cut from the Seine to the Saone, which joins 
the Rhone in Lyons. This gives continuous water trans- 
portation from the mouth of the Seine at Havre, on the 
English Channel, and from Paris and hundreds of in- 
terior towns and cities, to Lyons, and so to Marseilles. 
Between us and the river was quite a large piece of 
open ground, and this space of ground, as we saw it at 
night, was entirely unoccupied; but as we looked out 
on it in the morning it was filled with people, men and 
women, young and old, with booths and wagons piled 
high, loaded with fruits and vegetables, meats, and every- 



French Peasants on Market Days 95 

thing eatable. It was a most busy scene; everyone 
seemed to be full of light and joyous activity. 

Women were talking and gesticulating rapidly and 
prettily, as French women do ; boys and girls were run- 
ning up and down with joyous shout and halloa, ap- 
parently helping, or trying to help, their parents. And 
a little to one side we saw a congregation of carts, 
wagons, horses, cows, and oxen, all harnessed. There 
was a great patient cow, as large and stout as an ox, 
from whose large and distended udder had probably 
been drawn the milk that had made a breakfast that 
morning for some of those boys and girls, and on this 
cow was a harness precisely like the heavy harnesses we 
see on draught horses in America, except that it had no 
bridle. This cow had obviously come from some farm, 
drawing a load of fruit and vegetables, on top of which 
was perched an entire family, laughing and joyously 
chattering as they came to this great gathering. And 
what was this aggregation that so usurped and filled 
this place? From its looks it might be the citizens of 
France under another Paul Kruger, trekking from their 
homes to some unknown land ; or was it not like the en- 
campment of Israelites under Moses, when trekking 
across the Red Sea and camping for forty years in the 
wilderness, before coming in sight of the Promised 
Land ? All these questions might have come to me, but 
they did not ; for it was Wednesday, and I knew what 
that meant. 

It was market day, and these people had come there 
during the night from fields and farms all around, 
bringing with them, fresh from their fields, the fruits 
and vegetables of that sunny land. There were oranges, 



96 French Peasants on Market Days 

pears, and apples, plucked but the day before from the 
trees, with the leaves hanging on the branches, still fresh 
and un wilted ; eggs fresh laid, and milk, fresh and rich 
in cream ; grapes and plums and lustrous roses, that but 
the day before hung on southern slopes, tanned and 
purpling as kissed by the rays of the southern sun. And 
through this motley and cheerful aggregation were 
going dames of the city purchasing their supplies for 
half a week (for market days in France are twice a 
week — ^Wednesdays and Saturdays), and following be- 
hind them, boys balancing on their heads baskets filled to 
overflowing with these ripe and luscious spoils of the 
husbandman; and others going, half curiously, as we 
had gone at Lausanne, because we wished to secure some 
fresh grapes, pears, or plums, or some roses just plucked 
from their bush. Nothing is sent home by these market 
people; everyone who purchases at these markets pays 
cash, and takes it away himself, and so, in a few hours, 
it had all ended and the cows and oxen and horses were 
harnessed again to the wagons and carts, the women 
and children climbed in, and, with their little silver and 
gold pieces clinking in their pockets, started away for 
the little home on some remote hillside, perhaps to glean 
and gather again for the next market day. 

These market days are one of the established institu- 
tions in France and Switzerland, and where there is no 
open, convenient space, certain streets, known and 
understood by vendors and buyers, are surrendered 
to this good-natured, rapid, and useful traffic. Hardly 
could there be devised a better plan for bringing to- 
gether the producer and consumer — giving to the farmer 
a ready cash market and to the dwellers in the city 



From Geneva to the Riviera 97 

fruits and vegetables, fresh and rich and luscious with 
the glow and warmth of the sun of the day before. 

XV 

From Geneva to the Riviera 

Nice, Dec. 17. 
On our journey to Lyons, to our right were steep, pre- 
cipitous hills which looked like the outlying ridges of 
the Jura range, which lies along the northern shore of 
Lake Geneva. We were on the south side of these hills, 
and, consequently, had in view the slopes fronting on 
the south ; and nearly all the way, on these steep south- 
ern slopes, were the well-tended and luxuriant vineyards, 
built in terraces, bearing the large white grapes, some- 
times almost purpling in the sun ; and these carefully 
tended vineyards hung all along these slopes, sometimes 
in little clearings breaking into the forest line, and ex- 
tending almost to the top of the ridge. And ever and 
anon these hills would send one of their rocky spurs 
down to the river's brink, and then our train would shoot 
through the ridge or spur by one of the tunnels, which 
are quite frequent, and appear to be easily made in this 
rather soft limestone rock which appears almost every- 
where in the Alpine districts. 

At our left ran the Rhone, not a very large river, but 
broken and rippled by its swift descent from these 
mountainous regions. We followed the Rhone, I should 
think, about four hours. It seemed to me to be a river 
in many ways resembling the Merrimac — perhaps not 
quite so large, but certainly with a more rapid descent 
than has the Merrimac after it escapes from the fast- 
nesses of the White Mountains. But the Merrimac is 



98 From Geneva to the Riviera 

in Yankeeland, and the Rhone is in France. The Merri- 
mac at Manchester, Lowell, and Lawrence is harnessed 
so as to yield to man every pound of the impact of its 
falling waters, and is forced to turn great wheels, which 
drive millions of shuttles and spindles, which weave and 
make the cotton fabrics for a nation. Certainly, it 
would be difficult to find a river apparently better 
adapted to furnish water power than the Rhone, but I 
did not see, during all our journey, any indication that 
its enormous power is at all utilized, except for what 
appear to be small mills, for grinding the corn and 
wheat of the various localities. 

As we see the Arve bringing its swollen floods from 
the great altitude of the Mont Blanc tableland, and the 
city of Geneva burning roots, small twigs, and branches 
of trees, complaining that coal is $15 a ton, we wonder 
that no one has thought to harness the Arve, so that 
from its icy flow shall come light and heat for fair, 
beautiful, and historic Geneva. 

And, looking from our window, beyond there appeared 
the same ridge that had seemed to tower on our right 
all the way from Geneva; but instead of being covered 
with vines and forests of evergreen and fruitful trees, 
it was covered thick with buildings, large and small, 
towering one above the other as they climbed toward the 
summit ; and on the top, the highest point in the city 
(as seems to be usual in French cities), was the great 
cathedral, and as the sun went down, and the shadows 
of the evening quickly fell, all that hillside broke out 
in a glare of electric light, very picturesque and beau- 
tiful, as we saw it across the river, and reflected in its 
shining waters. 



From Geneva to the Riviera 99 

We spent the first afternoon and the following day in 
Lyons, driving round the city and through its park, in a 
cold, disagreeable rain. The next evening, at about 
seven o'clock, we again took train for Marseilles. This 
was a through train from Paris — what is called a " train 
de luxe " — and was furnished and run more like our best 
American trains than any other trains I had seen on 
the Continent. On the train was a dining car, in which 
was served a good dinner, which is a luxury but little 
known in Continental traveling. Our train stopped at 
about eleven o'clock, and we were told that we had 
reached Marseilles, and, leaving our train, we passed 
from the depot into a terminus hotel. These terminus 
hotels — generally built and maintained by the railway 
companies — are peculiar to Europe, and, I think, on the 
whole, they furnish attractions and conveniences which 
we do not have in America. We walked directly from 
the depot into the hotel, and when we resumed our 
journey, passing out of the hall by a side door, we were 
in the depot and convenient to our train. 

In the morning, passing along the hall of the hotel, 
I saw a man of swarthy complexion, in a peculiar cos- 
tume, part of which was a bright red cap or " fez," 
which easily identified him as a Mohammedan, or at least 
as an East Indian. On the depot platform we saw some 
tall, fine-looking men in zouave uniform. The interpre- 
ter told us that they were zouaves who had just come 
back from the French colonies at Morocco and Algiers, 
and he added that these zouaves are drawn from Brit- 
tany and Normandy, in the northern part of France, 
and are regarded as the flower of the French army. All 
these things told us that we were on the border line of 



100 From Geneva to the Riviera 

European civilization. From Marseilles there is a line 
of steamboats which, traversing the Mediterreanean, 
pass through the Suez Canal, and on down through the 
Red Sea and Indian Ocean, taking passengers to Ceylon, 
from thence the transfer is easy to India and all the 
adjacent islands of the fabled and wondrous East. 
There are also regular lines of steamers to the French 
possessions in Algiers, to Corsica, to Sardinia, to Egypt, 
to Constantinople, and to Syria ; and Marseilles, we find, 
is the great southern and Mediterranean seaport of 
France. As we crossed the Channel some months earher 
we learned that on the Channel boat were many passen- 
gers for Constantinople and India, via Marseilles, and 
that that line is the favored route from London to the 
great English Indian Empire. 

Again taking train at about nine o'clock in the morn- 
ing, we were taken northerly from Marseilles, but soon 
turned to the east and were brought along the shore of 
the Mediterranean to Nice, in about four hours. Most 
of this journey was with the Mediterranean clearly in 
view on our right, and on our left steep hills or moun- 
tains often coming down to the sea and traversed by 
the railroad through deep cuts or tunnels. At two 
o'clock we were at Nice, the largest city on what is 
known as the Riviera. 

There seem to be two sections or parts to what is 
known as the Riviera: Nice is in the westerly section, 
which is best known, and may fairly be called " The 
Riviera." This westerly section extends from the 
vicinity of Toulon to Genoa, little over two hundred 
miles. Looking at the map, it will be seen that this por- 
tion of the coast is on what is called the Gulf of Lyons, 



From Geneva to the Riviera 101 

fronting generally to the southwest and shielded from 
westerly winds and westerly ocean currents by Spain 
and the heights of the Pyrenees, and on the east shut 
in by Italy and the wooded Apennines. 

The Mediterranean, covering an area as great as all 
the States of the Union east of the Mississippi, is al- 
most tideless, its rise and fall on account of tides being 
less than one foot. This great bay opens toward the 
great, rainless, hot Sahara region, and, protected by 
the sheltering arms of Spain and Italy on either side, 
and generally un vexed by winds, its waters are quite 
warm, even in winter, and break in gentle waves along 
the pebbly shore as though lulling to rest and inviting 
to indolence. Bathing houses are along the shore, and 
bathing here, in December, is almost as much a matter 
of course as it is at Coney Island in July and August. 
Back a few miles from the coast, through all these two 
hundred miles, are ranges of limestone mountains, which, 
they tell us, are the Maritime Alps, and so, with the 
warm water of the placid Mediterranean on the south 
and these rocky ridges along the north, and other moun- 
tains on either side to intercept and break the winds and 
take and draw from the clouds their moisture and their 
rains, the Riviera has a climate, which, warm and at- 
tractive even in winter, reveals itself to us in the glow 
and warmth of bright, rich, and generous sunshine, 
where, discarding overcoats, we lounge and walk as 
though winter, with its frosts and ice, were for memory 
only. 

Now, in December, we still see in the parks and gar- 
dens orange trees bending beneath their burden of yel- 
low fruit, half hidden among long, green taper leaves, 



102 From Geneva to the Riviera 

still bright and clear, untouched by frost — roses rich 
and fragrant as though laughing in the caresses of a 
July sun — and on all sides, in gardens, yards, and 
parks, and often along the sidewalks, next to the car- 
riage line, palms ten or twenty feet in height and from 
one to two feet in diameter, each with its verdant crown 
of lustrous green leaves, ten or fifteen feet in length, 
in shape like ostrich plumes, seeming, as they wave and 
toss, to rejoice and be exceeding glad, as they breathe 
the soft air, rich with the sparkle and warmth of the 
December sun. i^ 

Our guide book, which seems full and accurate, in- 
structs us as to the climate and the vegetable growth of 
this fair southern slope, as follows : 

The main winter temperature (November, December, and Janu- 
ary) of Hyeres, considered the coolest of the winter stations, is 
50.3 degrees Fahrenheit, and of San Remo, considered the mildest, 
51 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest months are December and 
January. With February the temperature commences to rise 
progressively. Throughout the entire region bright and dusty 
weather is the rule, cloudy and wet weather the exception. In 
December wild flowers are rare till after Christmas, when the 
long-bracted orchid, the purple anemone, and the violet, make 
their appearance. These by the end of January have become 
abundant, and are quickly followed in February by crocuses, 
primroses, and pretty blue hepaticas. Meanwhile, the star-anem- 
ones are springing up in the olive woods, with periwinkles and 
rich, red anemones. In March the hillsides are fragrant with 
thyme, lavender, and the Mediterranean heath, to which April 
adds cistuses, helianthemums, convolvuli, serapiases, and gladioli. 
The date-palm flourishes in the open air. Capital walking sticks 
are made of the midrib of the leaf. Among the trees which 
fructify freely are the orange, lemon, and citron trees, the pepper 
tree, the camphor tree, the locust tree, the tree vronica, the mag- 
nolia, and different species of the eucalyptus or gum tree, and of 
the true acacia. In marshy places the common bamboo attains 
a great height; while the aloe and the opuntium, or prickly-pear, 
clothe the rocky banks with verdure. 



From Geneva to the Riviera 103 

Perhaps someone will say: Why do you go to Nice? 
Are there no Rivieras, no land of orange and palm, no 
savannahs fanned by southern breezes or lapped by 
gentle waves in America ? Indeed there are ; and better 
than vineclad hills or southern seas is the dear land 
and scenes which have been home and comfort to me for 
fifty years. More beautiful than the orange or the palm 
is the sturdy maple, with its wilderness of leaves flutter- 
ing in purple and in gold when smitten and chilled by 
the frosty breath of our autumnal days ; and better than 
the soft lapping of southern waves Is the crash and roar 
of Atlantic billows when lashed and driven by the stress 
of November gales. But neither Mrs. Johnson nor I 
have ever been to Europe before this journey, and we 
would not end our journey without seeing the Coliseum, 
the Pantheon, and St. Peter's; and Nice is on the direct 
road to Rome, and a convenient place in which to halt 
until the spring, which is reputed to be a better season 
than the winter to visit Rome; and so I suppose early 
in March we shall take boat from here to Genoa and go 
from there to Florence and to Rome, and then to Naples 
and Pompeii, to look in wonder, and, perhaps, dread, at 
the great volcano which, I believe, is active this year; 
and then take boat from Naples, and, sailing past Spain 
and Algiers, past the Rock of Gibraltar (once known 
as the Pillar of Hercules), break out, as Columbus did, 
Into the great, broad Atlantic; and touching, perhaps, 
at the Azores, reach New York, Brooklyn, and — ^home, 
as I hope. In April. How does the future and the un- 
known still lure us on and on ; but I am sure there Is and 
can be no joy of travel like that of returning home; for 
when abroad we " drag at each remove a lengthening 
chain." 



104 Cheerfulness of the French People 

XVI 

Cheerfulness of the French PEOPiiE 

Florence, Feb. 29, 190 — . 
We left Nice on the 13th, proceeding to Genoa, and 
thence to Milan, and to Venice, and arrived here a week 
ago. We expect to sail for home from Naples in April, 
and as we shall not retrace our steps, I feel that I would 
not leave the sunny lands in which we have lingered for 
the last six months without a final word of retrospect, 
and, as it were, summing up of the impressions of travel. 
From various reasons, but I think mostly from the 
record of what seemed to me the disgraceful prosecu- 
tion of Dreyfus, I had entered France with a very poor 
impression of the French people. I am happy, and feel 
obligated, to say that that impression is entirely re- 
moved, and I left France with a great admiration for 
the French people as I saw them in my travels. The 
good-nature of the French is simply invincible. Nor is 
this good-nature any surface show, but it seems a 
spontaneous bubbling forth from a great well-spring 
of kindness and good-nature beneath. It is often quite 
vexatious to be unable to speak the language of those 
we are in contact with, and I confess that in the first 
surprise of attempting to communicate in English in 
a French country, I would often find myself quite irri- 
tated, and, I fear, sometimes, in thought at least, not 
quite polite or altogether courteous : but the abun- 
dant good-nature of the French never seemed to fail 
or tire in such situations ; and I often found myself 
wondering whether, if conditions were reversed and I 



Cheerfulness of the French People 105 

were at home listening to a Frenchman attempting to 
make his way through our country, without understand- 
ing a word of English, wondering whether or not I 
would be I as patient and conciHatory to the French 
stranger in my own country as I found these French 
people were to me. 

I would give an instance of these good-natured acts, 
and so state one, which, though not much in itself, seems 
to me so typical of the prevailing sentiment of the 
French people that I have thought of it very often. 

When in Paris we engaged a carriage for a ride in 
the Bois de Boulogne. The carriage was one of these 
low, open carriages about like our victorias, except the 
wheels were low and the body swung near the ground ; 
the driver was on a seat just in front of us. He was 
a great hulk of a man, fat, brawny, and good-natured, 
with a face that seemed always dimpling with a half- 
suppressed smile. We told him to drive in the farther 
and less frequented parts of the wood; and, going 
through the old city gate, we soon found ourselves far 
from the whirl and rush which, on that afternoon, was 
thronging the road leading to the race course; and in 
a stillness, almost as though we were in the pathways 
of a forest primeval, we moved slowly along the shaded 
road. 

Suddenly our driver rose from his seat and began to 
gesticulate wildly, talking in words we could not at all 
understand. His gestures and motions caused us to 
look into the near-by wood, where we saw a Httle herd 
of deer feeding on the rich grass that was spread like 
a carpet through and among the frequent small, but 
high, trees along the roadside. When he saw that we 



106 Cheerfulness of the French People 

had seen the deer he seemed satisfied, and, resuming his 
seat, he started his horse at a slow trot. Proceeding a 
short distance we found our driver suddenly again stand- 
ing and gesticulating and talking more wildly than 
before, and, looking where he pointed, we saw another 
and larger herd of deer grazing quietly in the near-by 
wood. This was a Httle too much for us, and so, 
motioning him to remain, we stepped from the carriage 
and started to walk through the woods to secure a nearer 
view of this second and larger herd. As we were ap- 
proaching them they seemed disturbed, as it appeared, 
by something on the side farthest from us — and, looking 
through the thick clumps of trees, we saw our friend, the 
driver, hulking along about as nimbly as a rhinoceros, 
his face one great expansive smile, for he was driving 
the deer toward us that we might the better see them. 
There was not much in this, I know, but the exuberant 
good-nature, the obvious spontaneity of the whole pro- 
ceeding, made us think of him as a great-heart, whom 
it was a pleasure to meet in the dusty round of otherwise 
commonplace travel. 

In the barber shop that I patronized while in Nice 
there was a boy of about 10 or 12 years old, apparently 
the son of the proprietor. I would not enter the shop 
before the boy was by, with some httle thoughtful at- 
tention, taking hat or cane, and a pleasant " Bon jour " 
(good-morning) — always a pleasant welcome and inci- 
dent of my entering. When I was there last, as I left, 
the boy and the father equally had a kind " Bon voy- 
age " (good journey) for me, and the father told me 
the boy was going to New York, where I have no doubt 
he will soon appear, and with his quiet, thoughtful in- 



Cheerfulness of the French People 107 

diistry, will soon be making his way along the line of 
effort he may select. 

There was a little girl who used to come to take and 
return the wash for the washerwoman: and this little 
girl was so thoughtful, so assiduous, so punctual, and, 
withal, so helpful to her mother, the washerwoman, that 
she seemed a very rainbow of comfort, solace, and sup- 
port to her old mother in the humble path along which 
they walk. 

In France the people all work, and the children help 
the parents and grow up in their work. Their industry, 
economy, and carefulness in all they undertake to do 
is remarkable and very pleasing. For in that industry 
and economy is the secret of their immense success in 
unloosing the hold, and ending the occupation of the 
German armies, by paying the immense debt which was 
contracted as the price for securing such release. 

France is the only country I have ever been in where 
a severe and merciless conscription is enforced. 

In England the men for the army and navy are sup- 
plied (as in America) by voluntary enlistment. 

In Switzerland the men at certain ages are called out 
for what they call " the maneuvers." The men go into 
camp, and march and countermarch to secure positions 
for their sham or mimic battles. We saw many of the 
regiments coming and going from these maneuvers 
and the services required seemed to me less like that de- 
manded of our regular soldiery than like the encamp- 
ment and drills of our national guard; besides, Switzer- 
land being interior, having no coast line, has no navy 
whatever, -and the traditional and settled policy of the 
republic renders it highly improbable that Switzerland 



108 Soldiers in the French Academy 

will ever be drawn into any of the fierce and desperate 
wars which so often have desolated the fields and ex- 
acted a sacrifice of the best and bravest of the young 
men of the nations engaged in the war. 

But in France the case is quite different. France has 
long frontier lines entirely undefended by any river or 
natural obstacles, and just beyond those frontier lines 
on every side are great conscript armies, having in 
their ranks a ^million or more of highly trained soldiers. 
To defend herself against these surrounding armies 
France relies entirely on her conscription. Under this 
conscription every able-bodied young man, when he 
reaches the age of twenty-one, is compelled to enter the 
army for a term of three years, and during that period 
of time he goes into camp, and is as much a part of the 
active army of France as are the soldiers of our regular 
army stationed at Fort Hamilton, or fighting on the 
Indian frontier. 

XVII 

How S01.DIE11S ARE Made in the French Army 

Nice, March 6, 190—. 
From the military service in France no exemption what- 
ever is allowed, either on account of profession, business, 
or money payment. If any young man would claim ex- 
emption on account of physical inability, he must notify 
the proper officers and have that debility ascertained 
and duly certified before he is summoned to the ranks. 
This conscription keeps under arms about 500,000 
men; the privates receive only about five centimes a 
day, which is only equal to one cent of our money, while 



Soldiers in the French Army 109 

the pay of the oflScers is very nominal ; and officers, while 
in this active army, are not allowed to marry except 
they marry a lady having a dowry of. 10,000 francs, or 
$2000. 

During the three years of service the young con- 
script is in the active army, and in what may be termed 
the first line; and if France should be drawn into the 
war, it is from these young conscripts, drawing but a 
penny a day, that the armies at the front must be 
drawn. Nor is the service of the young Frenchman com- 
plete at the end of his three years. For during the first 
three years after his discharge he is liable to twenty- 
eight days' additional service, and, also to twenty-eight 
days in the next three years, and to a short prescribed 
term of service each year for six years more; and dur- 
ing all that time, and, indeed, until he is 45 years of 
age, he is deemed to be in the reserve army and hable 
to be summoned to the front in case of war. So that it 
is the assured lot of the young Frenchman that during 
three years of his active life he must be in the front 
ranks of the armies of the Republic, and that practically 
during all his years of best maturity he will be in the 
active or reserve army. It is estimated that adding 
the men in the reserve army — the men who have already 
given three years to active service — to the men in the 
active army and doing their first three years of service, 
the French republic has at her disposal 1,800,000 men. 
I may add that this burden is borne by Frenchmen alone, 
and that a person subject to a foreign country, residing 
in France, is exempt from this conscription. And yet 
it seems to me the French carry the burden of this im- 
mense military service willingly and cheerfully, and I 



110 Soldiers in the French Academy 

think the fact of such miHtary service is a great con- 
servative force in France to-day. It was Rufus Choate, 
I think, who spoke of " the bulletins in which her First 
Consul told to France her dream of glory." But to-day 
the case is quite different. If any Frenchman hungers 
to-day for war or conquest, he knows that the soldiers 
for the war must be taken from his own kindred, from 
the very flower and life-blood of young France, and 
from the men who are on the first line of battle in their 
first three years of conscript service. And I think this 
conscription will prevent France from being hastily 
drawn into the Asiatic or any other war, so that the 
Republic, with all its military burden, is to-day a con- 
servative force and a force for peace in the politics and 
international affairs of the world. And so I say: 
" Bravo for France ! Plucky and patient RepubHc ! " 
the only great nation that I know of which, being 
purely and entirely a republic, bears patiently the 
burdens of a severe conscription and keeps the very 
flower of her manhood always on the front line, to re- 
sist or repel attack or invasion. 

At Nice the Maritime Alps seem pushed back a little 
from the shore, and on a little plain thus left between 
the sea and the mountains Is that city of above 100,000 
people, more than half of whom are probably transients, 
like ourselves, there only temporarily, to enjoy the 
beautiful sunshine and the many attractions of the place. 
As we proceed toward the mountains from the sea the 
first rise brings us to a little plateau, where there Is the 
ruin of an old Roman structure built In stone, which is 
called an amphitheater. Near it is a new, large, and 



Soldiers in the French Army 111 

palatial hotel, where Queen Victoria was accustomed to 
come in winter, occupying when there one entire wing 
of the hotel. The hotel itself is called the Regina, and 
running back from it is a road leading up the mountains 
to the height of 4000 or 5000 feet — a superb road from 
which is had a grand view of the city of Nice, locked 
in between the circling sea and these outlying Alpine 
ridges. 

As we pass to the west of Nice the mountains come 
down to the shore in sharp and serried ridges. About 
twenty miles to the west is a place called Mentone, which 
we visited one day, driving over and along these lime- 
stone ridges on a wide, broad military road, called the 
Cornice Road, said to have been constructed by the first 
Napoleon. At Mentone we were shown a modest wooden 
house in which we were told is the residence of Paul 
Kruger, ex-President of the Boer Republic, an old man 
of eighty, whose life has run through strange and 
somber histories. 

Just beyond Mentone is a great fissure in the moun- 
tains which extends down to the sea, and is the boundary 
line between Italy and France. On the bridge which 
crosses it is set up a large flat stone, on one side of 
which , is chiseled " France," and on the other side 
" Italy," and on the two sides of this great cleft in the 
hills we saw the customs officers in the uniforms of the 
two countries, bright and conspicuous in red and blue — 
the diverse colors of the two nations. 

But our way, then, was not to the west, but back to 
Nice. And driving back along the shore, about midway 
to Nice, we came to Monte Carlo. Just before we 
reached Monte Carlo we saw to our left a rocky cape 



112 Monte Carlo 

or promontory projecting into the sea. On this rocky 
promontory there was pointed out a house, said to be 
the winter residence of Sir Thomas Lipton, known in 
America for his plucky and persevering efforts to take 
home a cup which seems to be nailed fast to the do- 
main of the American eagle, and to be destined to re- 
main the trophy of the eagle, and under the protection 
of the starry flag. 

A little farther out on the promontory is another and 
larger house, which is the winter residence of Eugenie, 
the widow of Napoleon III., and the mother of the 
prince whose marble effigy, cut in polished marble, we 
had seen in the chapel at Windsor Castle. 

XVIII 

Monte Carlo, the Cancer Spot of Europe 

Monte Carlo, March 10. 
Near and just beyond Monte Carlo a great rock 
makes out of the sea, rising perpendicularly nearly 200 
feet in height, on top of which is the palace of the 
Prince of Monaco. And there is a little area, probably 
not more than a mile square, which is called Monaco, 
and it is said to be entirely independent — to be a little 
sovereignty all by itself. The Prince of Monaco is said 
to own all the land there and to be the king or emperor, 
at any rate, governor or over-lord, of this little tract of 
land, in which is the notorious gambling palace of Monte 
Carlo. The Prince leases the palace and adjusts the 
laws so as to favor and protect the gambling which is 
there carried on. 

We took the trolley up the steep hill to the palace, 



Monte Carlo 113 

and there saw a detachment of his army, a soldier 
marching up and down before the door. Going inside, 
we found the palace was built around a great open court, 
and looking down over from the perpendicular height 
to the sea, we thought it very much such a place as 
Byron describes in his " Corsair," and we wondered 
whether in old days this rocky pinnacle had not been 
the fortress and refuge of some pirate gang who there 
found safe retreat from their excursions of rapine and 
murder. 

This little dukedom or principality is in some respects 
the cancer spot of Europe. Not only is gambling there 
allowed, but it flourishes under the seeming patronage 
of the sovereign power of the principality. Monaco, 
geographically, is part of France, and it seems as 
absurd to consider that little square mile as an inde- 
pendent country as it would be to imagine Coney Island 
separated from the United States, with a separate flag 
and the right to maintain an army and navy of its own, 
and using all its power and patronage of government 
to sustain great gambling establishments. 

I do not think there is a place in Europe naturally 
more attractive than Monaco. It is in the Riviera, 
where it is understood the air is the softest and the 
skies the brightest of any part of Europe. In front is 
the Mediterranean, with a deep harbor protected by the 
great fortress rock, on which is built the palace of the 
Prince. Back of it the Maritime Alps rise sharp and 
steep to the height of 3000 and 5000 feet, shield- 
ing and protecting from the frosts and cold winds 
of northern Europe; and these mountains, being of 
limestone, are easily aff^ected by the rains and snows, 



114 Monte Carlo 

and have been worn and furrowed by frost and rain 
until their pinnacles stand up rugged and furrowed, cut 
often into fantastic and curious shapes, seeming, as we 
look up to them in the glint and glow of the setting sun, 
Hke the towers and battlements of some ethereal city, 
and we almost wonder that from their tops we see no 
flaunting flags, no pomp or sound of aerial hosts. 

From this little principality to the top of this moun- 
tain range, to the far, high pinnacles glinting and 
gleaming against the sky, there is a railroad operated 
by cable, which will swiftly and speedily carry us from 
this eyrie by the sea to the highest point of those far-off 
peaks. About half way to the top the traveler on such 
a journey would pass a round tower, without door or 
window — I should think about twenty feet across and 
fifty feet in height. And, if he is curious to learn, he 
will be informed that it is an old Roman fortification, 
built in the time of Augustus — perhaps indicating the 
point where some Roman garrison made a last and 
desperate stand against the Goths or Vandals, who 
poured over these rocky walls, making for the rich val- 
leys and rich and splendid cities that lay below. 

As I have said, this little principality naturally be- 
longs to France, and would doubtless be absorbed and 
taken by France were it not for the gambling cancer 
that has fastened there. For France, I suppose, does 
not care to incur the obloquy of sustaining or per- 
mitting gambling so notorious ; nor does she care to 
assume by force the ofl5ce and responsibility of surgeon 
to remove the cancer. 

Near the Casino where gambling is carried on are 
hotels and restaurants, I suppose as well served and as 



Monte Carlo 115 

luxurious in appointment as anything in Europe or 
America. A little way farther back is a bank, a post 
office, drug stores, etc. Crossing the ravine we come to 
the palace and settlement of Monaco — it is a little 
principality devoted to pleasure, and to pleasure only ; 
and yet I have never seen faces so haggard, careworn, or 
burdened with unrest than I have seen in and around 
those gay and splendid palaces. No one can, nor would, 
I think, care to live there, if he were not a patron of, 
employed in, or in some way subservient to, the gam- 
bling; and in the country round about it is reported 
that, in the early morning round of the policeman many 
of these men with haggard and drawn faces are found 
lying dead under those great fir trees, and that nothing 
is said about it, and no report is allowed to go therefrom 
to any newspaper. At the lowest point of this princi- 
pality, in the dry bottom of a ravine, is a little church, 
where, it is whispered, the would-be suicides go when, 
broken at the gambling table, they seek oblivion and 
repose in the short, sharp shock of self-destruction. 

But the policy of the place is to keep all those things 
quiet, and the motto is, " On with the dance " — even 
though it is the dance of death. 

We have much in our own fair land that we would 
wish were different ; but, at least, we may be thankful 
that nowhere within it is there a place where the hateful 
vice of gambling is the only occupation or business; 
and no place where this most deadly of contagions 
flaunts its power and its ill-gotten wealth so brazenly 
as it does at Monte Carlo. 



116 Venice and Other Historic Cities 



XIX 

Venice and Other Historic Cities of Northern 
Italy 

Rome, March 31, 190 — . 
Leaving Nice, travehng eastwardly by rail, our first 
stop was at Genoa. Genoa is the chief commercial city 
of Italy, and has been a city of large commercial im- 
portance for more than a thousand years. It has 
owned navies, carried on wars, and disputed, during the 
Middle Ages, for supremacy on these inland seas. A 
spur of the Maritime Alps, here, breaking out into the 
sea, and making an effective barrier not only against 
waves, but against winds, is the basis of its harbor. 
This rocky spur has been supplemented by great moles 
or dykes, which make the harbor thoroughly protected 
against all incoming seas. The city's antiquity gives 
it a very peculiar appearance. The streets are narrow, 
crooked, and irregular, and the whole town seems to rise 
terrace above terrace on the rocky ridges of these Mari- 
time Alps. But to Americans Genoa has peculiar in- 
terest, because it was here, in this great commercial port, 
that four hundred years ago lived a Genoese navigator 
who, looking out on the sea from these rocky headlands, 
saw as in a vision a strange, new, -and hitherto unknown 
world, and after years of toil was able to make the voy- 
age which revealed to Europe a strange, new world, and 
made the name of Columbus immortal. 

As we emerged from the railroad station, just to the 
north, we saw a monument of Columbus, on the sides of 
which had been chiseled, in marble, in relief, different 



Venice and Other Historic Cities 117 

scenes in the hfe of the great Genoese navigator. On 
one of these steep and narrow streets is a small house 
in which Columbus is said to have lived. The guide 
books say it is open two days in the week. I made no 
attempt to visit it, but Mrs. Johnson, more energetic 
than myself, with some lady friends, made a pilgrimage 
up the steep and narrow street, only to find the house 
closed, and to be informed that the caretaker, or janitor, 
was sick, and that no admission to the house could be 
had on that day. Our hotel was " Smith's Hotel." We 
selected it partly because we guessed that a hotel in an 
Italian city named good plain " Smith " would be a 
place where English and good straight North American 
would be understood and spoken. Reaching the hotel 
we found it was a place where our good old mother 
tongue prevailed, and we thought the Smith family 
older, better, and nobler than the younger mushroom 
nobility of the present day. The hotel was an old 
monastery, built of stone, with walls two or three feet 
thick. The billiard- and smoking-room was one of 
its largest rooms, and we were told it was the old 
chapel — ^the place where the pious monks from day to 
day assembled to pray. Perhaps if any of them should 
look in there when the place was brilliantly lighted, and 
listen to the click of billiard balls and glasses and 
notice the smoke from fragrant cigars, the place would 
not seem quite familiar: but that, however, is a matter 
for the monks to adjust with the Smith family. 

Leaving Genoa by rail, our route carried us up by 
the southerly slopes of the Maritime Alps, until near 
their summit, when the train suddenly entered a tun- 
nel in which it continued about five minutes ; and 



118 Venice and Other Historic Cities 

when we came out from the tunnel we found Genoa, 
the Mediterranean, and all the bright and beautiful 
Riviera were hidden from our view, separated from us 
by a great rocky barrier, and as we looked ahead we saw 
far down, a beautiful plain extending north and west 
as far as the eye could reach. A little later, peering 
still to the north, the direction in which our train was 
traveling, high up, through or among the clouds, we saw 
what we supposed to be the Alps, capped with snow, 
bright and dazzling white, and seeming, through the 
curtain of the clouds, almost as though we had caught 
a glimpse of hills and mountains ethereal, floating in 
those great white cloud-banks. Soon our swift-moving 
train carried us ofl* the ridges of those Maritime Alps 
and down to the great plain, across which we had been 
gazing as we came down the mountain. We then found 
ourselves on a broad plain, as level, it seemed to me, 
as Long Island, cut by frequent deep and swift-flowing 
streams, fed and replenished, I suppose, from the great 
snow-clad mountain we had seen to the north. It was 
a country apparently very highly cultivated, with fre- 
quent houses, near which were barns and sheds, horses, 
cattle, and sheep, and all the aggregation ordinarily 
seen in the farm life of America. Clusters of trees, ap- 
parently orchards, were quite frequent, and the farms 
were enclosed by good, substantial fences, and as I 
looked out I could hardly believe that this was Italy, 
for it seemed to me rather as though it were a section 
of the farm lands of the Connecticut or Mohawk valleys. 
About five hours of travel through a country level but 
never monotonous brought us to Milan, a city of about 
400,000 inhabitants, situate near the center of this 



Venice and Other Historic Cities 119 

great Lombard plain. There we saw the great ca- 
thedral, popularly known by the name of the city 
where it is situated — the " Milan Cathedral." This 
magnificent Gothic cathedral in size is second only to 
St. Peter's here in Rome and to the Cathedral of Seville, 
in Spain. Despairing of giving any adequate descrip- 
tion of this beautiful cathedral, I enclose a picture of it, 
which I hope you will print in connection with this letter. 
This great cathedral is nearly 500 feet long, SOO feet 
wide, and is 155 feet high. Within it are 6000 statues, 
besides great granite monoliths, while in the wilderness 
of pinnacles and turrets that rise from its great marble 
exterior are over 2000 life-size marble statues of the 
greatest beauty, some by Canova. This cathedral is 
one of the best examples of Gothic architecture. Look- 
ing up, in its great exterior, we see everywhere, above 
the pointed arches, and on the sides, the high, jointed 
windows, fitly supplemented by the points, spires, and 
pinnacles, rising from its great exterior. Looking at 
this great temple, I could but think how well Gothic 
architecture expresses the thoughts and the aspira- 
tions of Christian religion, and the whole edifice seemed 
to me to symbolize a prayer or exhalation of praise 
to the unseen and infinite God. A little outside 
the city we saw a triumphal arch, like the great 
triumphal arches we see in Rome, like those built by 
the first Napoleon in the city of Paris, and not unlike 
the arch in the plaza of our Prospect Park. This arch 
is so placed that, looking from the city through the arch, 
the gaze is directed toward the great Simplon pass, 
down which came the armies of Napoleon to the conquest 
of Italy. This arch was begun by Napoleon and em- 



120 Venice and Other Historic Cities 

bellished by reliefs to record his victories over Austria. 
After Napoleon had been defeated and banished to St. 
Helena the Austrians took up his unfinished work and 
completed the arch, adding decorations of their own to 
show the victories of Austria over France. 

From Milan we traveled still by rail along those 
beautiful, fertile Lombard plains until one afternoon, 
just before dusk, the train stopped in a great enclosure, 
in which we saw printed the words " Venezia," and which 
we understood was the terminus of our railroad journey 
to Venice. Passing out of the train we put ourselves 
under the care of a hotel porter or shouter, who spoke 
English, and conducted us down to the water's brink, 
and instructed us to step into the boat which lay at the 
shore. Stepping on the boat we soon placed ourselves 
inside the little enclosure, or cabin, appearing on the 
deck of the gondolas. 

Soon our trunks were brought and placed in front of 
us on the gondola. The gondolier, who takes his posi- 
tion at the stem of the boat, swung his oar, and our 
voyage in a Venetian gondola on the Grand Canal of 
Venice began. This great canal I should think was 
about as wide as the Boulevard leading from Prospect 
Park to the ocean, including all the roads, grassplots, 
and courtyards on either side. But soon our fickle 
craft turned from the Grand Canal, and we began to 
thread narrow, tortuous, and crooked ways, crossed 
by frequent low bridges, where the houses seemed to 
almost overhang. We have since learned that the 
Grand Canal being shaped like the letter S, our gon- 
dolier had taken a route through these narrow ways in 
order to shorten the j oumey by avoiding the curves and 



Venice and Other Historic Cities 121 

windings of the great S. These narrow waterways are 
called rios. Emerging from one of them, making a 
quick turn to the left, we found our little shallop was 
again in the Grand Canal, and soon our gondola was 
safely moored, and we found it was lying up against 
some stone steps, over which extended a broad and com- 
modious piazza. Moving gingerly and carefully out of 
the little cabin, we stepped ashore, and going up those 
steps, we found we were at once inside our hotel. We 
had not up to that time seen much of the poetry or 
song of Venice, but that evening, sitting in the great 
public room which fronts on the Canal, we heard beau- 
tiful, rich music coming from the front of the hotel, and 
looking out on the Canal, which was then dark, except 
for the lights from the hotel, it seemed cold and chilly 
— it was then an evening in February — ^but in the half- 
gloom, by the lights from the hotel we saw a gondola 
filled with young people, men or boys and maidens, sing- 
ing with ay force, a j oy , a verve, an enthusiasm of song 
and melody that told us we were in Italy, the land of 
music and of song. Stepping out on the little piazza, 
we found there was not one of those singers so enwrapt 
in song, or lost in breathing melodies, as to fail to ex- 
tend the ready hat or hand for a contribution. Further 
exploration of this strange and curious city was reserved 
until the next morning, when, securing a guide, we 
passed out through a side door to a curious little street 
running near the rear of the hotel. This street, like 
many others, was very narrow — I should think not more 
than three or four feet wide. But why should it be 
wider.? There are no horses or carriages in Venice, and 
the entire street is properly used by pedestrians. 



122 Venice and Other Historic Cities 

Soon we came to one of the little rios, crossed by a 
low stone bridge. Crossing this bridge, we found we 
were in the great square of San Marco. The guide 
book told us that in this square was a vast isolated 
Gothic Campanile (bell-tower or structure for support- 
ing great bells) built in 911, and that inside it was an 
inclined plane leading to its top, 322 feet high; and 
that up this inclined plane the first Napoleon rode on 
his war-horse when he passed through Venice as he made 
his conquering march from the Alps. As we entered the 
great square we saw that it was entirely open — fiat and 
level, paved with great flat stones, and in it was no 
indication of the great Campanile that made so large 
a picture in the guide books and views of Venice. Ask- 
ing for the Campanile, our guide informed us that about 
two years ago the great Campanile suddenly fell, col- 
lapsed into a great mass of dust and crushed and broken 
brick and mortar, and a little later he showed us a great 
bell, which he told us was the only one of all those in 
the great Campanile that escaped destruction in the 
fall. 

Just before the great Campanile fell it spread apart, 
as though wearily yielding to the weight of its thousand 
years. While it was in that condition — as it were in 
the pangs of dissolution — someone was fortunate 
enough to secure a photograph of it; and we find on 
sale copies of that photograph, which was taken on 
the 14th of July, 1902, at 9.52 a. m., and less than 
fifteen minutes before the great, venerable, and historic 
pile crumbled to dust and ashes. 

We were four days in Venice. On one of our jour- 
neys up the Grand Canal a gondolier pointed out to us a 



Venice and Other Historic Cities 123 

house fronting on the canal, where Browning hved and 
died, and on the other side a house in which Lord Byron 
is said to have written his " Don Juan." 

Leaving Venice, a journey of five hours by rail 
brought us to Florence, a city of 180,000 population, 
situated on the Arno, on a high tableland between 
ridges of the Apennines. Many Americans will remem- 
ber Florence as the place from which James, G. Blaine 
wrote his famous and wonderful " Florentine " letter, 
which set the music of the campaign, and did much 
to direct the policy and history of the Great Republic 
for a decade after. 

Florence is a perfect treasure-house of art, and in 
its galleries are found the master-pieces, both in marble 
and on canvas, of the great masters of Italy. Spending 
two happy and busy weeks in Florence, we reluctantly 
resumed our journey southward, and crossing one of 
the great spurs of the Apennines, we soon found our- 
selves on the more level country below. Soon, along 
the left of our train, we saw the outlines of a quiet, 
peaceful lake, said to be about thirty by eight miles in 
area, which is Lake Thrasymene, which gives its name 
to one of the great battles of history and probably to 
the greatest defeat which ever came to the Roman arms, 
for it was by that quiet lake that Hannibal annihilated 
the Roman army 200 years before Christ. Proceeding 
still southward, we soon found we were following a river, 
which being brown, turbid, and rapid, we surmised must 
be the historic Tiber. Our surmise was correct, for 
following the valley of this river, after about five hours 
of rapid railway travel, a little before 6 o'clock p. m., 
we saw on our right the great dome of St. Peter's, and 



124 The Homes of the Cassars 

in twenty minutes more we were in the Eternal City, 
enjoying the hospitahty of a hotel, which opened its 
great sheltering arms to receive us. We have been here 
now four weeks and expect to remain about ten days 
longer. Of course we have seen St. Peter's, St. Paul's 
without the walls, St. John Lateran and the Coliseum, 
and as we look upon these mighty monuments how true 
and appropriate seem the words of our own Emerson: 

" For out of thought's interior sphere 
Those wonders rose to upper air; 
And Nature gladly gave them place, 
Adopted them into her race, 
And granted them an equal date 
With Andes and with Ararat ! " 



XX 

The Homes of the C^sars 

I KNOW not how I can better put your readers in touch 
with Rome, or in touch with those who traverse its 
ancient and historic streets, than by describing an after- 
noon on the Palatine Hill. Contrary to our usual cus- 
tom we had secured a guide for that afternoon — an 
English lady — very intelligent, energetic, and con- 
scientious in her efforts to impart the information she 
had acquired from many years' residence in Rome. 

Leaving our hotel at three o'clock a short drive car- 
ried us down a narrow street which brought us to the 
old Roman Forum. In the days of Roman pros- 
perity this was the place of assemblage of the people. 
In it was the old Senate House, a temple to Saturn, 
said to have been founded by Romulus, and near it 



The Homes of the Caesars 125 

the home of Juhus Caesar, the place where he left 
Calpurnia, his wife, when, refusing to heed her warn- 
ings and prophecies of evil, he went, as we now know, to 
his death by assassination. Passing around the end of 
the Forum to a point near where are two high ruined 
columns, we found ourselves outside a gate where stood 
a number of soldiers in the uniform of the Italian army. 
Paying an admission fee of one lire (20 cents) each, 
we passed up a road constructed in the side of the 
hill, behind those high columns. On our left was the 
Forum, and on our right a rough, irregular bank ris- 
ing about twenty or thirty feet higher than the road 
along which we were walking; and in this bank we could 
see where excavators were busy digging out of the bank 
and out of what seemed to be the solid hill, the lower 
stories of the palace of Caligula. Turning from the 
road we passed leisurely through what has now been 
revealed of that old palace. There we saw enormous 
brick walls, arched overhead, and I should think with 
about two tiers of arches, one above another, beneath 
the superincumbent earth. I suppose what we there saw 
were the lower stories, . basement or perhaps cellar, 
of the palace of the Roman Emperor who there lived 
and reigned in splendor two thousand years ago. 
The guide book tells us that this Palatine Hill was 
owned by the Farnese family, and on it they had 
vineyards or gardens through the Middle Ages, which 
means, I suppose, for the last thousand years. And 
down under these arches, from time to time, their 
gardeners shoveled or tumbled the refuse from the 
broken palace above, or the soil and earth from the 
verdant gardens. Passing a little farther, we saw heavy 



126 The Homes of the Caesars 

brick stairways, apparently constructed to convey to 
the stories above. Soon on our right, situated so as to 
give a view across the western part of the city, the broad 
Campagna and out over the Appian Way and the Alban 
Hills, we saw an old wooden building, apparently once 
the summer house of the Farnese, built just outside their 
gardens and vineyards, and though perhaps its owners 
did not know it, just above the ruins of a palace of the 
Csesars. In front of the house a beautiful fountain 
plays, as though glad with the joy of eternal youth; 
but the house itself, doubtless more than a thousand 
years younger than the great vaulted ruins that lie be- 
neath it, seems old, tarnished, and shrunken, as though 
ready to yield to the weight of years and crumble into 
ruin above the mightier ruins that lie beneath. Pro- 
ceeding again onward, beyond the gardens and vine- 
yards, we were very soon on the highest portions of the 
Palatine Hill, and found its surface generally level, 
partly covered with grass, around and through which 
run hnes of bare brown earth, trodden by many feet 
into hard, smooth, and level paths. 

Soon we came to some excavations, I should think 
about fifteen feet deep, bounded, crossed, and intersected 
by heavy brick walls ; and looking down we saw those 
spaces, large and small, all connected by doorways and 
passages, and all encased in brick, and there, freed by 
the shovel of the excavator from the mold of twenty 
centuries, unroofed and open were revealed to us the 
saloons, dining hall, parlors, and bedrooms of the 
haughty Livia and the home surroundings of Augustus 
Caesar. 

A little to the left of this old excavated palace of 



The Homes of the Caesars 127 

Livia appeared a number of ruins above ground and 
which did not seem to have been revealed by the labor 
of the excavator. At one place among these ruins ap- 
pearing above ground we were shown old broken walls 
which we were told were the ruins of the judgment hall 
of the Caesars, and the tradition is that there is the spot 
where Paul was judged and acquitted by Nero. Next to 
that judgment hall is another large ruin. In its center 
is a square plot of unpaved ground which we were told 
was once a flower garden, and around this square plot 
were formerly fluted marble columns, some of which and 
remnants of others still remain ; these columns formerly 
supported the roof of a piazza which surrounded the 
flower space in the center. We were shown little rem- 
nants of the poHshed marble floor and of the wall or 
ceiling back of those fluted columns and underneath the 
piazza roof. That,, we understood, was the ruin of 
a sort of lounging- or reception-room adjacent to the 
dining hall. 

Next to that were other ruins, which we were told 
were the ruins of the old dining hall, at one end of which 
the wall bulged outwards so as to make a great convex 
in which were the seat and table of the Emperor. Just 
beyond, and back of the convex where sat the Emperor, 
was a small obscure room which, we were told, was the 
Vomitarium, an annex which the Romans seem to have 
found necessary in order to protract their gluttonous 
repasts 

A little way from these ruins there is the Stadium of 
Domitian, where were held foot races, contests in throw- 
ing the discus, boxing, and other similar games. On the 
side of, and overlooking the Stadium, were the ruins of 



128 The Homes of the Caesars 

a great stone tower or cupola, from which the Emperor, 
as from the front of his palace, could view the games 
below. 

Turning from the palace of Domitian, we took a road 
which led us round the other side of the Palatine, and 
looking down into the valley we saw great gas-holders 
and all the paraphernalia of the gas works of a great 
city. That, we were told, was the site of the old Circus 
Maximus, where were held the great chariot races in 
which the Roman nobles and princes drove their war 
chariots in fierce and dangerous competition in the sight 
of the Emperor, who, from another great stone cupola 
built on that side of the hill, could watch the races and 
know the winner from seeing the colors of the foremost 
charioteer. 

Just beyond the gas works a low green mound swelled 
up from the httle valley, and on it we could see the fre- 
quent gavestones, half hidden by the thick, overhanging 
trees. Beyond the cemetery was another hill called the 
Aventine, on which, we were told, was the home and 
fortress of the Sabines, and that on that little cemetery 
mound between the Aventine and the Palatine was where 
the Sabine women came to feast with the Romans, and 
that there was the scene of the rape of the Sabine women 
and where those fierce Romans took captive their fair 
guests and carried them shrieking to their homes on 
the Palatine ; and doubtless, too, I suppose, there was the 
place where the Sabines and Romans met in bloody en- 
counter when the fathers and brothers and Sabine lovers 
of those fair captured women came to reclaim them by 
the fierce energy of battle. And we could imagine 
the Sabine women as they came down from the Palatine 



The Homes of the Cgesars 129 

and flung themselves in terror between their husbands 
and their fathers and so brought peace and reconcilia- 
tion between the Romans and the Sabines — ^between 
Aventine and Palatine, two of the largest of the seven 
hills of Rome. Passing still on down a good, broad road 
or path built along the side of the hill, we saw a wall 
built of large square blocks of stone, erect, plumb, and 
square and unbroken. This, we were told, was the wall 
of Romulus, built when he founded Rome, more than 
seven hundred years before Christ. Near the wall is a 
little opening under the rocky structure of the Palatine. 
This we were told is the cave that tradition assigns as 
the lair of the she-wolf who nursed the Roman twins 
when they were washed in there by the swollen and over- 
flowing Tiber, which here makes a sharp bend in toward 
the Palatine. 

As we came slowly down that road along the side of 
the Palatine, our gaze turned almost unconsciously 
across the Tiber, by whose turbid waters tradition as- 
serts the Roman twins were brought to the Palatine Hill, 
and there, on the very crest of Janiculum Hill, which 
rises west of and beyond the Tiber, breaking and stand- 
ing out clear and distinct on the horizon, there appeared 
the great monument to Garibaldi — in form the general 
seated on his war horse, in bronze^ — raised aloft on a 
great granite base and visible and conspicuous from 
almost every part of Rome. 

Before we came to the foot of the Palatine the sun 
had gone down behind Janiculum, but its rays, coming 
full and almost horizontal across the monument, seemed 
to enwrap and enfold the fiery general in a radiant 
glow. The Italians venerate Garibaldi as their Wash- 



130 The Homes of the Csesars 

ington, and in every Italian city we have been in we 
have seen one, and often more than one, monument to 
the great liberator; but nowhere have we seen a monu- 
ment more fortunately placed than this one — on the 
western horizon line of a great city, where ever will 
linger the last radiance and glory of the setting sun. 

But soon, too soon it seemed, we had come to the 
enclosure of the hill, and at the expense of a lire (only 
20 cents) had secured a carriage that took us back 
again past the Forum, and soon we were at home again 
in our hotel, feeling that we had had an afternoon rich 
in pleasure and in profit, which will remain one of the 
pleasantest pages of the albums of our memory. 

And here, in the heart of old Rome, I must bring 
these letters to an end, for I have booked a passage at 
an early day from Naples back to New York, and I hope 
very soon to tread the streets of a city greater and more 
powerful than was Rome in the days of her prime. 

I had no thought of writing any letters for publica- 
tion during my trip abroad until a few hours before I 
sailed last July, and as each of the first four or five 
letters was written, it seemed to me that each would be 
the last. And yet I would not take leave of this labor 
which has so long been with me without saying a word 
in relation to it. I have come to find it a pleasure to 
write letters which would be spread before so many thou- 
sands of the men and women of the city where I live. I 
have found Europe interesting and instructive in every 
part of my journey, but sometimes, and perhaps not 
infrequently, a feeling almost of homesickness would 
come over me, and at such times it was a pleasure to 
feel that through these letters I was a little in touch 



The Homes of the Csesars 131 

with friends in Brooklyn, with men I have known, some 
of whom perhaps might love me, and some, who do not 
love, might remember. In one of Kipling's recent poems 
he makes the English exile say: 

" How stands the old Lord Warden ? 
Are Dover's cliffs still white?" 

And so I wonder how will look the Iron Pier, Observa- 
tory and the great wheel as we approach Coney Island, 
and how will look the Goddess of Liberty and the hills 
on the either side, as we sail up the great waterway to 
anchorage at a New York dock, where we can buy a 
paper printed in the English language and hear the 
clang announcing the extras, as it comes in good 
straight English from boys who know no other lan- 
guage. 



D«C21»80« 



